Decolonizing the Museum

Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory, and Cultural Studies and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of transnationalism, postcoloniality, and decoloniality. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in museums and cultural institutions. She is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (2019) and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019; Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been and is involved in several major international research projects, connecting universities across the globe with different social partners, museums, and cultural institutions.

Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands, a museum group with locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam, and including also the WereldLab in Nijmegen. He is also Professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the edited volumes: Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe (with Nicholas Thomas et al.) and Spaces of Care - Confronting Colonial Afterlives in European Ethnographic Museums (with Claudia Augustat).

Marta Pagliuca Pelacani is an artistic researcher and doctoral candidate at University College Cork (UCC). Her research explores peasant heritage, storytelling, and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. She works with anti-colonial ontologies, anarchival methods, and socially engaged art, with a focus on curatorial approaches to archives and the epistemologies of historically dispossessed communities. She is co-convenor of UCC's Memory, Commemoration, and Uses of the Past research cluster and has taught at the University of Amsterdam.