Dr. Angela Wheeler joined AUR in 2025 as a lecturer in the Cultural Heritage graduate program. She has worked in and researched the cultural heritage sector since 2010, both in the United States and internationally, with a particular focus on (post-)socialist Eurasia. Professor Wheeler has surveyed mid-century public housing in Hawaii, documented Ottoman mosques in the Republic of Georgia, conserved archaeological artifacts at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and consulted with indigenous communities about the impact of fracking on Siberian landscapes - experiences she enjoys introducing to students to show them the breadth of professions within cultural heritage. Her research and teaching have focused on the cultural heritage of marginalized communities, preservation approaches to historic neighborhoods, and the role of states and international organizations in shaping heritage priorities.
Professor Wheeler has previously lectured at Johns Hopkins University, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she developed and taught courses on historic preservation, urban studies, and architectural history. Her goal as an educator is to provide students with not only technical skills but the theoretical, historical, and ethical contexts they need to interrogate the value systems underlying cultural heritage practice. As a researcher, Dr. Wheeler’s work explores how different regimes did (or did not) incorporate historic neighborhoods into urban plans, a process that often reflected whose homes, communities, and cultures were considered deserving of value.
Featured Works
- “Colonial Orientalism and National Vernacularism in Imperial Tiflis,” (Built Heritage, forthcoming 2026).
<https://built-heritage.springeropen.com/vernacularism-or-orientalism>
- “Reconstructing Rustaveli: the Postsocialist State of Emergency and the Last Soviet Plan for Historic Tbilisi,” (Built Heritage special issue Heritage Transitions in Eastern Europe: Actors, Institutions, and Potentials for Urban Conservation in the 1980s-1990s, forthcoming 2025)
<https://built-heritage.springeropen.com/heritage-transitions-in-eastern-europe>
- Architectural Guide: Tbilisi (DOM Publishers, 2023)
<https://dom-publishers.com/products/tbilisi>
- Wooden Mosques of Adjara: Islamic Architectural Heritage in the Republic of Georgia (2018)
<https://www.indigenousoutsiders.com/exhibition>
- “Birth and Rebirth: Mosques of Russia and the Caucasus” in Mosques: Splendors of Islam (Rizzoli, 2017)
<https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847860357/>
- “Mitigating the Risks of Fracking for Industrial Actors on Northern Indigenous Peoples” (ArcticReview on Law & Politics, 2017) Alexis Lerner, Olga Chistanova, Victoria Koshurina, Angela Wheeler
<https://arcticreview.no/index.php/arctic/article/view/659/1861>
Courses
- CH 505 Sustainable Conservation (Spring 2025)
- CH 508 / TTM 408 Cultural Heritage Tourism: Intercultural Interactions (Spring 2026)