Gert-Jan Burgers is full professor in Heritage and History of Cultural Landscapes and Urban Environments at the Faculty of Humanities of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA). He directs the interfaculty VU research institute CLUE+ for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage, with approx. 250 researchers from a range of disciplines from the Humanities, Religion and Theology, Science, Social Sciences, Law and Economics. Burgers is also coordinator of the Pan-european H2020 Marie Curie International Training Network 'Heriland. Cultural Heritage and the Planning of European Landscapes'. Prior to this, he was director of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (2012-2013) and Head of the Heritage and Ancient Studies departments of the same institute (2006-2013). In these capacities, Burgers’ mission has been to bring together researchers from a wide variety of academic disciplines, to jointly investigate scientific and societal challenges and to formulate strategies for addressing those challenges.
To that aim, over the last decades Burgers has developed and directed a series of large scale archaeological field projects in Italy. Since 2004 he has also directed critical heritage projects, notably in the Italian region of Apulia and in Rome (see below). Linking these projects to larger European consortiums, Burgers has built up an extensive international network of researchers, as well as of policy makers, urban planners, architects, citizen organisations and other stakeholder groups involved in heritage management and spatial planning and design. In all project cases Burgers has attracted substantial external funding from national and international public sector organizations, including NWO (Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research), Italian government departments and the European Union, as well as commercial sponsors.
