Chiara De Cesari is Associate Professor in European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her wide-ranging research explores how memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of contemporary globalization and state transformation. One strand of work explores how artists and activists are reclaiming and reinventing cultural institutions in different global contexts. Chiara is leading a major Dutch Research Council-funded project on this theme, named “Imagining Institutions Otherwise.” Another concerns the transnational politics of memory and cultural heritage, and colonial legacies in the present. Her monograph, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine was published by Stanford University Press in 2019. Chiara is currently co-writing another monograph, provisionally titled Curating the Colonial, which explores how museums are reframing colonial histories in response to postcolonial critiques. Across these interests, Chiara has published many articles in journals such as American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, and Memory Studies, and co-edited two key volumes in memory studies (European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019, and Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been involved in several international research schemes. Currently, she is involved in the HERA’s “en/counter/points” project and the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Innovation’s “Worlding Public Cultures” network.
