Peter has a long history in nature conservation and heritage issues, having been CEO of the Australian Nature Conservation Agency (1990 – 1999), Director of the Division of Ecological Sciences in UNESCO (1999 – 2003), Secretary-General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (2003 – 2007), and Chair of the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee (2007 – 2014). Recently he was involved with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), advising the Australian Delegation and representing Australia in 2018. He has just completed chairing the IPBES Review Panel. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Natural Resource Management by UNE in 1997 and was (jointly with Chair of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Management Board) awarded the UNESCO Picasso Gold medal for excellence in managing a World heritage Cultural Landscape. Peter currently chairs the Australian Biosphere Reserve Working Group.
Sulamith works in the area of Memory Studies and Museum Studies, focusing on the uses of public history and human rights in museums and memorial museums to promote notions of (trans) national justice and solidarity. She is author of the book The National Museum of Australia and the Debate about Australian Colonial History, published in German (Lit-Verlag 2013). Sulamith’s research project engages with the emergence of a new type of museum dedicated to representing difficult pasts and presents through a human rights lens. The growing body of scholarly literature on these human rights museums, which emerged over the past two and a half decades in different parts around the world, acknowledges that the global dissemination of Holocaust memories towards the end of the twentieth century led to changes in commemorative cultures that set the scene for the adoption of human right- based approaches in contemporary museum work. However, little is known about how commemorative patterns grounded in vernacularised Holocaust memories and associated memory practices shape public history projects that are human rights-focused. In providing a comparative analysis, based on exhibition contents, museum- authored material, government-related documentation, and semi- structured expert interviews with museum professionals, this research traces how overlaps and differences in narrative structure and forms of imagined (trans) national community building shape public engagements with difficult heritage in contemporary European and North American human rights museums.
Mary‘s association with the Research School of Humanities and the Arts began with her work as Research Associate on an ARC Linkage project with the National Museum of Australia, Migration Memories, 2005-08. She has worked professionally as a museum exhibition curator, oral historian, creator of interpretive public art, heritage researcher, adult educator, writer (including radio and theatre) and community artsworker. She is a past member of the ACT Heritage Council (2014-17) and contributes to the activites of the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies.
Emeritus Professor William Logan
William is Emeritus Professor at Deakin University and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He was formerly a member of the Heritage Council of Victoria, president of Australia ICOMOS and, at Deakin, UNESCO Chair of Heritage and Urbanism and Director of the university’s Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific (CHCAP), a UNESCO- endorsed research and training centre. He was awarded the Deakin University Researcher of the Year Award in 2002 and was made an Alfred Deakin Professor in 2004 for his contribution to the university’s research profile. His research record includes numerous Australian Research Council and other grants, three books on heritage in the Asian region (‘Hanoi: Biography of a City’, UNSW Press, University of Washington Press, & Select Publishing, Sydney/Seattle/Singapore, 2000, republished in Vietnamese by the Hanoi Publishing House, 2010; ‘The Disappearing “Asian” City: Protecting Asia’s Urban Heritage in a Globalizing World’, Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 2002; and ‘Vientiane: Transformation of a Lao Landscape’, with Marc Askew & Colin Long, Routledge, London, 2006), articles in refereed and professional journals, and conference papers. He was a member of the international advisory board of the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster, UK. He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Heritage Studies and was for many years on the editorial board of the Australia ICOMOS journal, Historic Environment. He initiated the Key Issues in Cultural Heritage series published by Routledge UK and is series co-editor with Laurajane Smith. He contributed chapters to eight volumes in the 17-volume series and co-edited five volumes: Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage (with Keir Reeves, 2009); Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights: Intersections in Theory and Practice (with Michele Langfield and Mairead Nic Craith, 2010); Heritage, Development and Sustainability (with Sophia Labadi 2016); Intellectual Property, Cultural Property and Intangible Heritage (with Christoph Antons 2018); and World Heritage and Sustainable Development (with Peter Larsen 2018). He also co- edited the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Heritage Studies (with Mairead Nic Craith and Ullrich Kockel, 2016). He was a member of the working group that drafted the UNESCO World Heritage and Sustainable Development policy (2015). He is currently working with the Korean National Commission for UNESCO on heritage interpretation in post-conflict contexts, especially in East Asia.
Emeritus Professor Howard Morphy
Howard is a distinguished Professor of Anthropology and was previously the founding Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University. Prior to returning to the Australian National University in 1997, he held the chair in Anthropology at University College London. Before that he spent ten years as a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. His involvement in e-research and in the development of museum exhibitions reflects his determination to make humanities research as accessible as possible to wider publics and to close the distance between the research process and research outcomes. In 2008 he was one of the organising committee of the major CIHA conference in Melbourne Crossing Cultures: conflict, migration, convergence. He is past-president of the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) of the American Anthropological Association. In 2013 he was awarded the Huxley Memorial medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and in 2017 the Distiguished Service Award of the CMA.
Associate Professor Michael Pickering
Professor Paul Tapsell
Emeritus Professor Ken Taylor AM
Ken is an Honorary Professor in the Centre whose research, teaching and professional activities for over 35 years have focused on theory and practice of cultural heritage management; cultural heritage as process and changing perspectives in the heritagisation process internationally; cultural landscape meanings, values and management with particular reference to ordinary/everyday places; Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach to urban conservation from theoretically and practice perspectives; Reading the landscape; World Heritage challenges and politics. He is a regular visitor to SE Asia and China for teaching, research and as a conference speaker and has been Visiting Professor at universities in China, Thailand, India, Japan. He has been consultant with ICOMOS, ICCROM and UNESCO. In the context of the politics of global cultural heritage management and cultural landscape perspectives—urban and rural—he has increasingly focused on Southeast Asia and China and now visits China regularly to teach and follow research interests with Chinese colleagues. From 2006-2017 he was an Associate Editor of Landscape Research and is on the editorial management board of Built Heritage.
Professor Paul Turnbull
Chris is Professor of Museology at the Newcastle University, UK, Professor II in Heritage Studies at the University of Oslo and Honorary Professor at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Chris trained and worked as an art historian and art curator, but his research activities today are much broader, encompassing museums of different types (especially history museums) and heritage, with particular emphases on the cultural politics of memory, display, knowledge construction and interpretation. He is currently working on political uses of the past, time and place, and contested histories and heritages, particularly where these relate to contemporary social tensions, division and conflict. He works across museum, memory and heritage studies but borrows approaches and interests from anthropology, geography, cultural theory, political science, design research, digital cultures and the theory of history. He is series editor (with Professor Peter Stone and Professor Peter Davis) of the Heritage Matters book series published by Boydell and Brewer. He is on the editorial Boards of Museum and Society, Museum History Journal, the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy and Curator: the Museum Journal. He is co-editor of the Routledge book series Critical Heritages of Europe. His latest book is Dimensions of Heritage and Memory: multiple Europes and the politics of crisis, Routledge (2019).