Building Future Heritage

Heritage is deeply entangled with violence, conflict, and the destructive transformations that are affecting our present such as the climate emergency. Yet, while heritage can be destroyed, transformed, re-interpreted or manipulated, it also serves as a powerful tool for cultural resistance and creativity, survival memory and societal healing. The ways we protect, interpret and produce heritage – across local, national and transnational contexts – can shape both historical justice and future peace by (re-)creating common grounds and solidarities. In the context of multiple, overlapping crises, the questions of heritage, conservation, and cultural memory take on a renewed urgency and require us to rethink our theoretical frameworks, concepts, and approaches. Four Dutch universities together – the University of Amsterdam, University of Groningen, Leiden University, and Utrecht University – propose to organize a one-day seminar on these themes. Starting from the recognition that heritage is never neutral but rather entangled with dynamics of power and identity-making, our focus is on the profound entanglement of the material and immaterial dimensions of heritage as well as that between past, present and future in processes of heritage-making. The seminar intends to serve as an incubator for inter-university co-operation and engagement on this important theme for societies in the past, present, and future.

Organized by Chiara de Cesari (UVA), Michiel van Groesen (UL), Lidewijde de Jong (RUG), Susanne Knittel (UU)

Date: 26 September 2025

Location: VOX POP BG 3 Binnengasthuisstraat 9, begane grond 1012 ZA Amsterdam

Programme

Speakers

Shanade Barnabas (Assistant Professor Cultural Heritage and Identity: Material and Intangible Heritage, University of Groningen)

Fatme El Bazzal (Lebanese National Library)

Canan Çakirlar (Associate Professor and head of Zooarchaeology Collections and Labs at the University of Groningen)

Richard Calis (Assistant Professor in Cultural History at Utrecht University)

Chiara de Cesari (Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, University of Amsterdam)

Julie Deschepper (Assistant Professor in Heritage and Museum Studies in the Cultural History section of Utrecht University)

Martijn Eickhoff (director of NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Professor in Archaeology and Heritage of War and Mass Violence at the University of Groningen)

Jamila Ghaddar (Assistant Professor in Archival Information & Digital Humanities at the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam)

Michiel van Groesen (Professor of Maritime History at the Leiden University Institute for History)

Lidewijde de Jong (Professor of East-Mediterranean and West-Asian Archaeology at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology)

Susanne Knittel (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University)

Federica Marulo (Assistant Professor Cultural Heritage and Identity: Material and Intangible Heritage, University of Groningen)

Erik Meinema (Assistant Professor Religion and Heritage at the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Univeristy of Utrecht)

Nawal Mustafa (Assistant Professor in Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Indigenous Studies, University of Amsterdam)

Zaynab Nemr (Lebanese University)

Julia Noordegraaf (Professor of Digital Heritage at University of Amsterdam)

Manuela Ritondale (Assistant Professor at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and a postdoctoral researcher in Digital Heritage at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology)

Lorena de Vita (Associate Professor in the History of International Relations, University of Utrecht)