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 globalisation, (post)coloniality and state transformation. One strand of work explores how artists and activists are reclaiming and reinventing cultural institutions. Chiara is currently leading a major Dutch National Research Council-funded Vidi project on this theme, named IMAGINART – Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation. Another strand concerns the transnational politics of memory and cultural heritage, above all in the West Bank. Her monograph, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019), argues that Palestinian civil society has enrolled museums and urban regeneration initiatives to assert its distinct cultural heritage amid the enduring Israeli occupation. Still another focuses on colonial legacies in contemporary Europe and beyond. Chiara is currently co-writing a monograph together with Wayne Modest; provisionally titled Curating the Colonial, it explores how museums are reframing colonial histories in response to postcolonial critiques and the kind of.
Chiara has published many articles in journals such as American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Memory Studies, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and co-edited two key volumes in memory studies (European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019; Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014) as well as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies on urban heritage and gentrification (2018). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been involved in several major international research projects. Currently, she is also co-PI of the NWA project ‘Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums’, and a member of the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Innovation’s ‘Worlding Public Cultures’ network.
