De Cesari’s work shows how countercultures, arts practices, and decolonial struggles can drive change within public institutions and cultural discourses. She leads the NWO-funded Vidi project IMAGINART - Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics and State Transformation (2020-2025), which explores how artists and cultural producers are collectively experimenting with and reinventing public cultural institutions, such as museums. ‘We investigate the intersection of the arts and cultural production with politics and developments at the state and governance levels’, says De Cesari. ‘I see those fields as deeply interconnected: the study of heritage and memory cannot be separated from the broader cultural studies landscape.’

Memories of colonialism

In her research, De Cesari also focuses on the heritage of colonialism in and beyond Europe. She examines in particular the relationship between colonial memories and racism in the present. In collaboration with Wayne Modest, Director of the National Museum of World Cultures, De Cesari is completing a monograph examining various attempts to reckon with the colonial past, focusing on transformative decolonial practices in and around museums and cultural institutions.

De Cesari is also co-PI of one section of the NWA project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums, in which several academic institutions, Dutch museums, and international partners investigate the contestations surrounding colonial museum collections and the issue of restitution. As part of this project, De Cesari is responsible for the Repair Lab, which brings together artists connected to some of the countries these collections come from, in order to collaboratively develop and test new models for the ownership and return of colonial objects. ‘We explore how we can tackle the restitution of colonial heritage in imaginative, future-oriented ways,’ says De Cesari, ‘while considering how this issue is firmly embedded in broader societal processes such as structural racism.’

Interdisciplinary zones of inquiry

As Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, De Cesari will focus on consolidating and expanding the interdisciplinary study of cultures and arts of memory. She will also be leading the Cultural Studies chair group. ‘Combining memory, heritage, museum and material culture with art studies under a broader cultural studies umbrella distinguishes the programme at the UvA from heritage and memory programmes elsewhere’, she says. ‘Those approaches and methodologies combined are also very well suited to study what is a burgeoning zone of memory-inflected cultural production and political imagination. I also want to connect teaching and learning more strongly with research, and to explore and intensify relations beyond the UvA – including with museums and heritage institutions in the Netherlands and beyond.’

About Chiara De Cesari

Committed to international and interdisciplinary collaboration, Chiara De Cesari has reaped the benefits of living and working in a variety of places across three continents. She obtained her BA and first MA from the Free University Berlin and her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Stanford University in 2009. After that, she held research and teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge, Utrecht and the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Since 2012, she has been affiliated with the UvA – first as interdisciplinary Assistant Professor and since 2019 as Associate Professor of European Studies and Cultural Studies.

De Cesari is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (2019, Stanford University Press), and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies, Transnational Memories (de Gruyter, 2014, with Ann Rigney) and European Memory in Populism (Routledge, 2019, with Ayhan Kaya), as well as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies on heritage and gentrification in a global perspective. In addition to that, De Cesari has worked with several museums in different countries, and curated exhibitions.