Sophie Anstee de Mas
- Role
- Researcher
Community Hub Manager
About
Sophie is currently the Community Hub Manager for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Community Research Hub. The hub seeks to support inclusive, community-led research across the UK’s galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector through grant giving, network building and knowledge sharing.
Before this role she worked as the Grants and Funding Officer, supporting the development of funding applications, administering of our sector funding portfolio, and management of our post-award funded projects. She came to The National Archives from English Heritage where she worked with their national youth engagement team, and sat on their national Blue Plaques panel.
Research activity
Sophie has a strong interest in public history and exploring new ways in which we can improve our engagement with, and interpretation of, the past. This manifested itself in different ways in both her BA in History and MA in Museum and Gallery Studies.
For her Masters Sophie explored the benefits of adopting object/collections-based approaches to audience engagement and interpretation at heritage sites, demonstrating improved visitor engagement and understanding of historical contexts. For her BA, she argued a case for the use of historical musicals as an effective and powerful form of public history, highlighting the lack of critical analyses shows such as Les Misérables and Miss Saigon receive despite having a huge influence over public understandings of 19th-century France and Vietnam in the 1970s.