Project management
Susan Legêne is a historian and professor of political history at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Legêne has published numerous lectures and articles, including on the interface between (colonial) history and museology.
Wayne Modest is Head of the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden and Professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies (by special appointment) in the faculty of humanities at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.
Karina Rinaldi-Doligez is the Prject Coordinator of Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums. Previously, she was a junior lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Principal investigators
Victor de Boer is an associate professor (UHD) at the User-Centric Data Science group at the Computer Science department of the VU and co-director of the Cultural AI Lab. He combines (Semantic) Web technologies with Human-Computer Interaction, Knowledge Representation and Information Extraction to tackle research challenges in various domains including Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities and ICT for Development (ICT4D).
Wouter Veraart is Professor of Legal Philosophy and Head of Department Legal Theory and Legal History at the VU University Amsterdam. He is responsible for the courses in legal philosophy within the Bachelor programmes of the Faculty of Law and committed to the Master Programme Philosophy of Legal Science.
Laurens de Rooy is curator and director of Museum Vrolik
Birgit Meyer is a professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. She studies faith and religion from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist.
Peter Pels (1958) is Professor in the Anthropology of Africa at the University of Leiden since 2003. He graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1993 on a study of interactions between missionaries and Africans in late colonial Tanganyika, and has since continued to work on the construction of differences of culture and power in human relationships.
Amade M’charek is Professor Anthropology of Science at the department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are in forensics, forensic anthropology and race.
Martijn Eickhoff is director of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is also Endowed Professor of Archaeology and Heritage of War and Mass Violence at the University of Groningen
NANCI ADLER is professor of memory, history, and transitional justice at the University of Amsterdam and program director of genocide studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Katja Kwastek (1970) is professor of modern and contemporary art at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is the author of the book Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (MIT Press, 2013) and specializes in intersections of art, new media and technology.
Chiara De Cesari is Associate Professor in European Studies and 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.
PhD researchers
Sarah is a Computer Science PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she is investigating the use of latest machine learning and semantic web technologies for Knowledge Discovery in Colonial Heritage Objects Database.
Quinsy Gario (he/him) is an artist-researcher whose doctorate research focuses on Dutch Caribbean (contemporary) artists' engagement with the presence and absence of Dutch Caribbean heritage in Dutch colonial collections. (Photo by Annemarija Gulbe)
Postdocs
Ana Rita Amaral is an anthropologist working at the intersection of history, museum studies, and religious studies, with a regional specialisation in West Central Africa and Angola. She focuses on the history and legacy of missionary collecting, and explores the entanglements of colonialism, anthropology, Christianity, and heritage. She is also interested in how these dynamics broadly shape current debates on restitution, museum practices, and cultural heritage.
Paul Wolff Mitchell (1990) specializes in provenance research, restitution policies, and forensic anthropology in relation to human ancestral remains, and in the history of anatomy, medicine, and anthropology.
Researchers
Karwin Cheung does research on histories of collecting and collections, with special focus on collections of Asian art and material culture.