Chiara De Cesari

Chiara De Cesari is  Professor of Heritage and Memory and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University in 2009 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University and at the ICI Berlin as well as a lecturer and coordinator of the MA in heritage and museum studies in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University. She is author of Heritage and the Struggle for Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the books Transnational Memories: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (de Gruyter, 2014, with Ann Rigney) and European Memory in Populism (Routledge, 2019, with Ayhan Kaya).

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. 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.

This project explores the current proliferation of heritage activities and cultural memory practices by ‘civil society’ organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It makes use of ethnography to investigate the ways in which heritage is woven into the political, with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also, more generally, to current transformations of the nation-state and its transnationalization. While heritage conservation has been historically monopolized by the state apparatuses, what is peculiar about Palestinian heritage-making today is that it is mainly produced by local non-governmental organizations entertaining multiple transnational connections.

This project examines the intersection of memory and heritage practices with the nationalist anti-colonial struggle, the current entanglement of heritage promotion with development aid and state-building, the dynamics of Palestinian cultural politics, the peculiar cosmopolitanism of Palestinian heritage and its effects on communities’ life. I am interested in exploring this socio-cultural formation in relation to forms of non-state or counter-governmentality inscribed in a transnational space.