Photo: Kirsten van Santen Chiara De Cesari
Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Having received a BA and MA from the Free University of Berlin and a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Stanford University, she has held research and teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge and Utrecht, among others. Her wide-ranging research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of contemporary globalization, (post)coloniality and state transformation.
Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been involved in several major international research projects. Currently, she is PI of Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics and State Transformation (IMAGINART) and co-PI of the NWA project ‘Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums‘, as well as a member of the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Innovation’s ‘Worlding Public Cultures’ network.
