In December, the UHI Archaeology Institute welcomed Dr Colleen Batey to its ranks of visiting academics.
A specialist in viking and Late Norse archaeology, Colleen joins visiting readers and professors Astrid Ogilvie, Leslie King, Mark Edmonds, Hugo Anderson-Whymark, Olwyn Owen and Gerry Bigelow.
She graduated from Durham University having achieved both undergraduate and PhD qualifications, her PhD focusing on the Viking and Late Norse period in Caithness.
She retired from Glasgow University Archaeology in 2019, having researched on the Viking period in Scotland since 1978.
Colleen’s long teaching career has encompassed adult education and community engagement throughout, alongside teaching and supervising several generations of students at all levels. She has served on several national and international committees (eg Member of Ancient Monuments Board of Scotland 2000-2002, Panel Member Arts and Humanities Research Council c2008-2011; European Science Foundation Assessment Panel 2010-2013 and as President of the Scottish Society of Northern Studies).
Between c. 1989 and 1995 she was editor of Discovery and Excavation in Scotland and joined the editorial board of the Journal of the North Atlantic in 2010. She has published extensively, both books and journal articles, and the EUP volume eds Horne, Pierce and Barrowman 2023 Vikings Age in Scotland: Studies in Scandinavian Archaeology is dedicated to her long -standing contribution to the subject.
In 2025, the long-standing project at the Earl’s Bu, Orphir, in Orkney, a major interdisciplinary project, came to publication.
As curator of archaeology at Glasgow Museums (1990 -2002), Colleen curated a major exhibition on Scythian gold from Russia at the Burrell Collection and was the British lead curator for the Vikings in the North Atlantic Smithsonian Millennial exhibition (1998-2002), with specific responsibility for object selection from Scottish museums. This reached an audience of over five million visitors in North America across several cities.
As a specialist in material culture she was head -hunted to train Icelandic students in Viking artefactual studies in the Institute of Icelandic Archaeology (FSI). She has excavated extensively throughout Scotland, but also at Tintagel, Cornwall and in Iceland.
Colleen is internationally renowned for her lecturing on the vikings in Scotland (e.g. The Stigler Lectureship, Arkansas 2000 and Beck Lectureship, University of Victoria, Canada 2007; University of Iceland and University of Lund). For the last 30 years she has lectured on small cruise ships around the viking world, promoting Scotland on this wider stage.
She currently holds honorary posts at UHI (Assoc Professor), University of Durham (Fellow of St John’s College and Archaeology) and most recently was appointed Honorary Professor in the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University. This latter appointment is specifically in recognition of her long and wide-ranging teaching career and wider promotion of Viking archaeology as part of the recent designation of Durham as a UNESCO Global Learning Hub.
