CIRCA is pleased to announce the acceptance of six Research Fellows for this first cohort of scholars. We have an impressive and diverse set of early career researchers and are looking forward to working with them for the next two years. Read more about each of them below and follow along as we will be more proactive with updates and news about happenings at CIRCA.
Helen Basson
Helen’s professional background is in Landscape Design as co-founder of Scape Design a practice specializing in creating sustainable, low-maintenance gardens in tough Mediterranean climates. Helen co-designed show gardens worldwide that won numerous medals including golds at Singapore, Philadelphia, Moscow, Japan, China, France, Sicily and Chelsea.
However her passion has always been history and in particular the formation of landscape through the interaction of humans and nature over time. Thus in 2018 Helen decided to focus on Landscape Archaeology, gaining an MA from the University of Sheffield in this subject (looking at the WW2 landscape of the Bocage in Normandy) and is currently in the final stages of a PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK researching conflict landscape recovery using the case study of the First World War battlefields. Her goal is to use the lessons from the past to create a framework for current traumatic landscape regeneration.
She has been a core team member of Archaeological projects with the Battlefield Archaeology Group in Normandy and Monte Cassino as well as in the Somme (where she lives) looking at landscape changes due to conflict from both world wars.
Helen regularly sits on the jury panel for the ‘Peace Gardens’ Initiative in Europe, whereby designers from different countries compete to create a peace garden at a location that is of particular historical relevance to their native country from the First World War. She also consults on historical landscape and archaeological considerations for design projects worldwide, and is a regular speaker at both Conflict Archaeology and Landscape Design schools and conferences.
Joseph E.B. Snider
Senior Staff Geophysicist – Terracon Consultants, Inc., Columbus, Ohio
Snider’s background combines over a decade and a half of experience in the Cultural Resources Management (CRM) field, including the successful completion of well over 400 CRM projects throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Owing to his extensive fieldwork experience in geophysical survey, photogrammetric modeling, archaeological excavation, and historical architecture survey, Snider has a wide breadth of expertise in historical residential, commercial, industrial, cemetery, and conflict site interpretation. With experience spanning three centuries of conflict, and large parts of the globe, Snider has participated in a variety of conflict site research from the excavation of a pre-French and Indian War conflict site in Ohio, to the geophysical survey of battlefields and Indian boarding school cemeteries in South Dakota, remote sensing surveys of earthen forts throughout the U.S., the geophysical survey of enslaved African American cemeteries in the Mid-Atlantic, and the geophysical survey and excavation of prisoner of war camp cemeteries and plane crash sites in Europe and southeast Asia.
Snider currently works for Terracon Consultants, Inc., in Columbus, Ohio, where he is responsible for a wide variety of geophysical survey in support of CRM projects from Phase I through Phase III archaeological survey assessment. Snider also currently serves in variety of positions within nonprofit local historical societies and preservation groups, including as Vice President of the Perry County Historical Society, and Archaeological Consultant to the Perry County Soil and Water Conservation District. As a result, he spends much of his spare time surveying historical buildings, archaeological sites, and historical cemeteries in southeast Ohio.
Richard Leese
Dr Richard Leese is a conflict archaeology researched, formerly of the University of Huddersfield. His doctoral research was in the archaeology of early modern sieges of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in England. Prior to this Richard studied for an MLitt in Battlefield and Conflict Archaeology at the University of Glasgow in 2013, and as an undergraduate was a War Studies student at the University of Wolverhampton in the mid-2000s. His current research interests include small-arms bullet impact scars on historic structures, and late medieval battlefields, and civil defence structures of the Cold War.
Euan Loarridge
Dr. Loarridge is a graduate of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology and completed his PhD at that University in 2023. His doctoral thesis, which explored the creation and maintenance of community in Scottish military units during the First World War, was supervised by Professor Tony Pollard and Dr. Catriona Macdonald. Following the completion of his studies he has taught conflict archaeology on the University of Utrecht’s Summer School Course ‘Battlefields Uncovered’, and for the past nine years he has acted as a finds officer for Waterloo Uncovered’s archaeological surveys of the 1815 Waterloo Battlefield.
Matt Kalos
Dr. Kalos earned his PhD from Temple University in 2017. His doctoral research focused on the American Revolutionary War’s Battle of Paoli. Dr. Kalos created and applied a layered landscape approach, examining how conflict archaeology sites can be examined through the lens of the physical, the cultural, the battle, and the mnemonic landscapes. Currently, Dr. Kalos serves as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lincroft, New Jersey’s Brookdale Community College. At Brookdale, Dr. Kalos teaches courses in anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and GIS. In addition to teaching in the classroom, Dr. Kalos created an archaeological field school where he teaches archaeological methods to students at sites throughout central New Jersey.