About me

Hello! I’m Ellie Miles. I work as a curator and research and write about museums. My particular areas of interest include contemporary collecting, digital collections, London in museums, and I’ve also got some cracking research going as a side project, about women curators in London in the twentieth century. At the moment I’m working at the London Transport Museum as a Documentary Curator, collecting stories, objects, voices and experiences of transport in London.

You can use this site to read my blog, find links to my research publications and presentations, access my thesis, and contact me. You’re more than welcome to leave me a comment, follow me on twitter or send me an email.

My PhD thesis is called Curating the Global City and is an in-depth study of the production of urban history in museums. Its focus is the Galleries of Modern London, which opened at the Museum of London in 2010. The galleries convey a story of London from 1666 to the present day, and I studied how this representation was put together. I’ve published a couple of thesis chapters as standalone pieces, if you don’t fancy reading the whole thing.

I started working at the Museum of London on Collections Online. I worked on several groups of printed ephemera, like victorian valentines cards and theatrical portraits, which I blogged about for the museum. Then I was Digital Curator at the Museum of London, experimenting with ways for the museum to collect born-digital material, including film, sound and social media. Then I worked at the British Museum as an Interpretation Officer, contributing to a series of exciting gallery redevelopments including the Korea Foundation gallery, Sutton Hoo and Early Medieval Europe, Early Egypt and the Waddesdon Bequest, and the exhibitions Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds and Sicily: Culture and Conquest. For a few years I taught an MA course about online museums and galleries at the University of Westminster.

Thank you for reading, drop me a line if you’d like to discuss my work. I’d love to hear from you!