Gathering of the Sectorplan Sub-Theme Material and Immaterial Heritage 26 September 2025, VOX POP 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…

Friday September 12, 2025 Interdisciplinary research workshop Organized by Erik Meinema in the context of the NWO Veni-project ‘Art, Religion, or Heritage?’ This workshop aimed to critically analyse how the frames of ‘art’, ‘heritage’ and ‘religion’ are mobilized to (re)present elements of the past and mark these as relevant for the present. Within critical heritage…

Report by Mohana Zwaga: On May 15th, Utrecht University hosted the event Interfaces of Heritage and Memory: A Conversation with Sharon Macdonald and Ann Rigney, bringing together two of the most prominent figures in their respective fields to reflect on the convergences and tensions between memory studies and critical heritage studies. Moderated by Susanne Knittel…

UU Heritage Lecture: Selling the past to remember it: Tourism’s generative frictions of slavery and colonial heritage The lecture and ceremony took place on April 11, 2025, 14.00-17.00 at Drift 25, Room 002, at Utrecht University. Explanation of the lecture from keynote speaker Emmanuel Adu-Ampong In this lecture, I offer an invitation and a provocation through…

Image credits: Photograph from the exhibition “The call of the O’o: Nature under pressure” at the Allard Pierson museum (photos: Allard Pierson museum). On 10 April, the Memory & Heritage Network of Utrecht University and the ERC project Ecologies of Violence: Crimes Against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination (EcoViolence) held a workshop on the…

On 10 December 2024, a lecture was held by Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha. As many Cottica Ndyuka recognize, the events and the memory of the war provoked critical political changes in the Cottica area of Eastern Suriname. This lecture explored how the memory of the violence and persecution of the war and the recollection…

10 December 2024 Memory is always selective. Especially today, we experience the push and pull between an excess of the past made present in society and the desire to forget on the one hand, and on the other the imperative to remember. In this workshop we focused on the relationship between memory and forgetting, taking…

On 30 April 2024, an expert meeting on heritage and conflict in Ukraine and beyond took place at Utrecht University, with the aim to draw attention to the relationship between communities’ well-being and the protection of cultural heritage. It was organised in light of the 70th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Hague Convention for the…

On 18 January, Italian activist Porpora Marcasciano launched her book AntoloGaia: Queering the Seventies, A Radical Trans Memoir. During the event, she was in dialogue with Gianmaria Colpani (Gender Studies, Utrecht University), Monica Jansen (Italian Language and Culture, Utrecht University), Marijke Huisman (Cultural History, Utrecht University), and Vreer Sirenu (TGEU and Principle 17, Amsterdam). AntoloGaia…

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the City as an Agent in Historical Culture. 1-Day Workshop at Utrecht University 31 October 2023, Drift 21, room 005 This workshop aimed to bring together three overlapping networks in the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University to discuss an important theme in the politics of heritage and memory. More than half…