She studied for a BA and PhD at the University of Cambridge.[1] Her thesis, awarded in 1997, was titled "The early-middle bronze age transition in Wessex, Sussex and the Thames Valley",[2] supervised by Marie Louise Stig Sorensen.[3]
Career
Bruck was a junior research fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge from 1997 to 1999. She then moved to University College Dublin, where she had been appointed a lecturer in archaeology in 1999.[4] By 2006, she had been promoted to senior lecturer.[1] In 2013, she moved to the University of Bristol where she had been appointed Reader in Archaeology.[5] She was promoted to Professor of Archaeology at Bristol, before returning University College Dublin as Professor of Archaeology and Head of the School of Archaeology in 2020.[4]
Her research themes have included the body and personhood, landscape, domestic architecture, material culture and deposition.[6] More recent work has included nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland, including the 1916 Rising and the archaeology of internment.[7]
She has edited several volumes, including Making Places in the Prehistoric World: Themes in Settlement Archaeology (1999) and Bronze Age Landscapes: Tradition and Transformation (2002).
She has received research funding form the British Academy.[1] In 1999 she co-established the Bronze Age Forum with Stuart Needham.[8] She was previously editor of PAST, the newsletter of the Prehistoric Society.[1] Bruck is on the editorial board of Archaeological Dialogues[9] and vice president of the Prehistoric Society.[10] In 2023 she was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy.[11]
Brück, J. 2004. Material metaphors: the relational construction of identity in Early Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain. Journal of Social Archaeology 4.3: 307-333.
Brück, J. 2005. Experiencing the past? The development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory. Archaeological Dialogues 12(1), 45-72.
^Bruck, Joanna Mary (1998). The early-middle bronze age transition in Wessex, Sussex and the Thames Valley. Unpublished Phd thesis. University of Cambridge. Department of Archaeology.