Professor Maria Economou is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Glasgow, where she holds a joint post between Information Studies (College of Arts and Humanities) and The Hunterian, the university’s museum and art gallery service. She holds a British Academy/Wolfson Foundation Research Professorship (2022-2025) on “Emotional engagement with museum collections through digital storytelling and participatory approaches”. She is founding co-director of Glasgow University’s Digital Cultural Heritage Arts Lab and was Vice-President of UNIVERSEUM, the European Academic Heritage Network (2018-2024).
Professor Economou is co-investigator in the €5.6-million Museums in the Metaverse project (2023-25) funded by Innovate UK. She led the Museums Galleries Scotland IDEA project on Increasing Digital Engagement and Access to the Hunterian Collections (2021-23) and the Scottish Network for the Evaluation of Digital Cultural Resources funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2015-16). She was Co-Investigator in a series of research projects (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council COVID-urgency grant Online teaching with digitised museum collections (2020-21); EU-MCSA POEM Innovative Training Network on Participatory Memory Practices (2018-22); EU-H2020 EMOTIVE (2016-19) on Emotive virtual cultural experiences through digital storytelling.
She previously worked at the University of the Aegean, Greece (as Assistant and Associate Professor in Museology and New Technologies, 2003-13), and in the UK at the University of Manchester (as Lecturer in Art Gallery and Museum Studies, 2000-2003), the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford (as Assistant Curator, Information Technology, 1995-1997), and the University of Glasgow (as Lecturer in Advanced Technologies for the Humanities, 1997-2000). She studied Archaeology (with History and History of Art) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, and a DPhil on Museum Archaeology from the University of Oxford.