Dr Rico is a Senior Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology of University College London and currently serving in the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.
Dr Rico's areas of research in critical heritage studies include risk, Islamic materiality, ethnography and the vernacularization of heritage discourses and expertise and heritage ethics. Her current research projects focus on the mobilization of Islamic values in the Arabian Peninsula and the study of heritage and secrecy in South America.
She is co-editor of Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula (Ashgate, 2014) and Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage (University Press of Colorado, 2015); as well as author of Constructing Destruction: Heritage Narratives in the Tsunami City (UCL Institute of Archaeology Critical Cultural Heritage Series, Routledge 2016). She is also founding editor of the series Heritage Studies in the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan) and editor of the first volume of the series, The Making of Islamic Heritage: Muslim Pasts and Heritage Presents (2017).
