Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage and Memory and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Trained in socio-cultural anthropology (Ph.D. Stanford 2009), Chiara is an internationally significant voice in debates over the geopolitical trajectories of contemporary culture. Her wide-ranging research explores how institutional manifestations of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of contemporary globalization and ongoing transformations of the nation-state. In particular, it concerns the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in museums. Against that backdrop, Chiara’s work shows how countercultures, arts practices, and decolonial struggles can drive change within public institutions and cultural discourses around heritage and identity more generally.

Within that overarching remit, her work has three principal interconnected strands.

One attends to emerging forms of creative institutionalism and statecraft. As part of this research, Chiara leads the NWO-funded Vidi project “Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation” (2020–2025). In exploring how artists and activists are reclaiming public cultural institutions such as museums, this project examines a range of experiments with institutions in crisis, both across and beyond Europe. As part of this line of work, Chiara developed the concept of “anticipatory representation” to grasp how arts practices creatively project and instantiate future institutions in the present (elaborated in this article and a chapter in this volume).

Another concerns legacies of colonialism in contemporary Europe. In collaboration with Wayne Modest, Head of Research at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, Chiara is writing a monograph, provisionally titled Curating the Colonial as part of HERA’s “en/counter/points” project. Also with the Tropenmuseum, she is developing a multidisciplinary academy of workshops and seminars as part of the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Innovation’s “Worlding Public Cultures” network, which involves universities and museums in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Together, these two projects explores how various museums are reframing colonial histories and collections in response to the emergence of post- and decolonial perspectives.

Both of these strands build on a body of work on the transnational politics of memory and cultural heritage. With regard to the Middle East, in particular the West Bank, Chiara’s monograph, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019) shows how Palestinian civil society has enrolled museums and urban regeneration initiatives to assert its distinct cultural heritage and reimagine future institutions amid the enduring Israeli occupation. In a journal special issue on Heritage, Gentrification, Participation (co-edited with Rozita Dimova), Chiara brings these reflections to bear on various urban landscapes at a global scale.

With regard to European memory, Chiara has led recent attempts to update and reconceptualize memory studies by co-editing two major interdisciplinary volumes: European Memory in Populism (Routledge, 2019, with Ayhan Kaya), and Transnational Memory (de Gruyter, 2014, with Ann Rigney) What is more, she co-curated the exhibition “What We Forget” (Amsterdam 2018); through the work of contemporary artists, it explored the continuing significance of Europe’s colonial pasts, which are so often repressed in dominant cultural discourses. In her work on European memory, Chiara has been involved in several other major international research projects, including the Horizon2020 “CoHERE - Critical Heritages: performing and representing identities in Europe” and the Marie Curie Innovative Training Network CHEurope.

Committed to international and interdisciplinary collaboration, Chiara has reaped the benefits of living and working in a variety of places across three continents. Before coming to the University of Amsterdam, she undertook doctoral research at Stanford University, postdoctoral research at Utrecht University and the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and taught in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.

In addition to the monographs and edited volumes indicated above, Chiara has published numerous articles and chapters, in not just English, but German, Italian, French, and Spanish too. They have appeared in top-tier refereed journals, such as Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Memory Studies, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Selected Publications