Dr Roger White FSA, MIfA

• BA Hons Liverpool
• PhD Liverpool (1987) Roman and Celtic Objects in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries

After completing his PhD, Roger was employed between 1987 and 1992 by English Heritage to write up the major excavations at Wroxeter Roman City in Shropshire. On substantial completion of this report, he returned to University of Liverpool to undertake temporary Lecturer posts in Archaeology. In 1994 he successfully applied to be a Leverhulme Research Fellow on the Wroxeter Hinterland Project, a ground-breaking three-year long post-doc research project designed to put the Roman city of Wroxeter into its social and economic landscape context. It involved extensive fieldwalking that required the recruitment of a volunteer database eventually rising to 400 members, and the first full geophysical survey of a Roman town. The results of the project were fully published in 2007 and 2014, and the project itself was successfully nominated by the University in 1999 for the Queens Anniversary Prize for 2000.  Following completion of the Wroxeter Hinterland Project, Roger was employed as a Project Manager and Finds Specialist by Birmingham Archaeology.

In 2000 he was appointed Academic Director of Ironbridge Institute, a postgraduate teaching partnership between the University and the award-winning and leading Independent museum, the Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust. Working from the Coalbrookdale site, the Ironbridge Institute ran programmes in Heritage Management, Industrial Archaeology, Industrial Heritage and Historic Environment Conservation. He was responsible for the design and implementation of Distance Learning programmes in Heritage Management from 2005. In 2012, when Professor Mike Robinson was appointed, the Ironbridge Institute was renamed the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage (IIICH) and returned to Birmingham, while retaining its offices on the Coalbrookdale site. Roger continued to hold the post of Academic Director until 2018 when he was reassigned to the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology. 

While employed at Ironbridge Institute he was employed as a consultant by English Heritage to write Conservation plans for Wroxeter Roman City and The Clee Hills in Shropshire, and by the Georgian State Archaeological Service to write a report on the Archaeological components of the World Heritage Site at Msksheta. He was employed by the University of Ljubliana as a tutor on an Archaeological Training Field School at Ljubliana Castle, Slovenia and was a member of an ICOM museums advisory team to Puskinskye Gorye, Russia. From 2007-2012 he was on the Council of the Institute for Archaeologists (now Chartered Institute for Archaeologists), of which he has been a Member since 1987. In 2012 he was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and between 2011-17 he served on the English Heritage (later Historic England) Advisory Committee. From 2017 he has been serving on the English Heritage Trust Research Committee. Between 2010 and 2017 he was Editor of The Historic Environment Policy and Practice, establishing it as a leader in the field of historic environment conservation and overseeing its growth from two issues per annum in its first years to four issues in 2016 onwards.

While still having responsibility and involvement in Distance Learning programmes in International Heritage Management for IIICH, especially in areas of Heritage Conservation and Interpretation, principal teaching now engages more fully with Archaeological programmes at undergraduate level in CAHA.

I am currently supervising PhD students in a range of archaeology and heritage-related topics. My specialist areas are in Roman / Romano-British Archaeology and Industrial Heritage. Please contact me if you wish to discuss a research topic.

Completed PhDs:

The Quarrying Industry in Shropshire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2017)
The industrial Heritage of Taiwan (2016)
The Eccentric Dead; early medieval cemeteries in East Anglia and Lindsey (2015)
The Mining Landscape of Frisco, Utah (2013)
Heritage Tourism in Jordan (2010)
Byzantine Towns in the eighth and ninth centuries (2008)
Iron Age funerary feasting rituals (2003)
Current PhD supervisions:

Big data and the PAS as a research tool for archaeologists
Heritage and Identity in Emilia Romagna
An analysis of Anglo-Saxon spearheads
Religious Heritage of Bangkok
Impacts of world heritage designation on a local community: the case of Santa Crux de Mompox, Colombia
Using GIS and Town Plan Analysis in the analysis of the topography, origins and development of English medieval towns: case studies of Northampton and selected Cheshire towns
Completed MA by Research:

The Value of Mobile Phone Applications in Heritage Interpretation (2015)
Iron Age and Roman Settlement in South Shropshire (2015)
William Hazeldine, millwright and ironmaster (2012)
Barytes Mining in Shropshire (2007)

Find out more - our PhD Classics and Ancient History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My principal area of research has been in the archaeology of the Roman town of Viroconium Cornoviorum at Wroxeter, Shropshire. This encompasses, however, a much broader interest in the settlement of Roman Britain and the transition to the early medieval period in which I seek to contextualise the Roman town within its broader social, political and economic histories. I am also very keen on engaging with the public on my research through public lectures and guided tours and regularly appear as a guest lecturer for numerous societies. My long-term engagement with the archaeology of Shropshire and the West Midlands has led to the development of a broad research interest in the region and its distinctive archaeologies, particularly in the historic rather than prehistoric era. Through my work at Ironbridge Institute, I have developed an appreciation of successful heritage management and am increasingly relating this interest to researching how sites of the Roman era are presented to the public across the former Roman Empire. 

For IIICH, I have been Academic Director, Admissions Tutor and Welfare Officer. For CAHA I am currently admissions tutor and was previously deputy exams officer.