Heidi Stoner

Originally from California, Heidi did a BA at Southern Oregon University where she undertook a practical dissertation with the Schneider Museum of Art working with art and archaeological collections. Following this Heidi moved to the UK in 2010 where she undertook both an MA and PhD at the University of York, alongside working for York Museums Trust in various roles and internships including working with the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past.

Heidi Stoner's research is primarily focused on Early Medieval material culture of the Insular world, with a particular focus on early church architecture and sculpture. Her PhD, awarded in 2017, was titled ‘Signifying Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: the visual languages of power and authority c. 500-1000.’

After her doctorate she undertook a three-year Early Career Fellowship sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust entitled ‘Sculpture in the Early Medieval Irish Sea c. 800-c.1000: Interlacing Traditions’ at Durham University. This project explored the cultural significance of the early medieval stone sculptures produced in the Irish Sea Regions of Britain and Ireland in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Following her fellowship, Heidi worked for Cotswold Archaeology first as a field archaeologist, then working in post excavation archiving. In January 2022, she joined the team at Canterbury Christ Church University where she is now a Senior Lecturer teaching across the Archaeology, History and Heritage degrees, and working with the Culver Archaeological Project to support an international field school based in Sussex. Heidi is still research active and is particularly interested in iconography, historiography, monumental art and its use in the early Christian and Insular Norse landscape. 

She is currently developing a project investigating Kent’s viking-age utilising evidence from a multidisciplinary approach including portable material culture, as recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme, charter evidence, and the rededication and rebuilding of churches in the 10th and 11th centuries seeks to tell a story of the viking past that had a seismic impact on communities between the ninth and eleventh centuries, and it is a history that remains both visible and mythologised within the landscape and heritage of the county today.