Ceri Houlbrook

Ceri Houlbrook is an Early Career Researcher in Intangible Cultural Heritage in the History Group. Her primary research interests are the heritage and material culture of ritual and folklore in the British Isles, from c.1700 to the present day. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2014, having focused on the archaeology and heritage of the British coin-tree. She joined the University of Hertfordshire in 2015 as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Inner Lives: Emotions, Identity and the Supernatural, 1300-1900 project, in which she worked with Professor Owen Davies on how anxiety and fear of the supernatural manifested itself materially in the domestic spaces of the 18^th-20^th centuries.

Ceri has co-edited a volume on The Materiality of Magic: An artefactual investigation into ritual practices and popular beliefs, published by Oxbow, and is currently working on a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan on The Roots of a Ritual: The magic of coin-trees from religion to recreation.

Ceri manages two blogs: the Love-Lock Diaries, which explores the global phenomenon of love-locking, and the Concealed Revealed, which focuses on hidden domestic deposits and their afterlives. She also manages the Archaeology of Contemporary Assemblages and Deposits (ACAD) Facebook group; a global network of researchers interested in modern-day ritual deposits.