I am holding the interuniversity VU-UvA Westerbork chair in War and Conflict Heritage at VU Amsterdam.
I came to join VU-CLUE in 2010 and was for five years head of the CLUE research cluster The Heritage and Memory of Conflict and War (with Koos Bosma, Jan Kolen and Dienke Hondius), after which I was appointed founding director of the Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) research school at the University of Amsterdam, where I had been program director in Heritage and Memory Studies before.
I studied history and anthropology at the UvA where I graduated and obtained my PhD both cum laude, while my dissertation was awarded a Praemium Erasmianum research Prize (1990). As a teacher and researcher I have been a staff member of the HvA's Education and the UvA's History, Media Studies, and Art and Culture departments, and a fellow at the ESRI Salford University, Jean Monnet fellow at the EUI Florance, fellow and theme leader at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), theme leader at the UvA priority program Heritage and Identity (ACHI) and the VU/UvA research centre ACCESS EUROPE (currently ACES and VICES), and panel assessor of NWO, RCN (Norway), HERA, JPICH, and ERC.
As CLUE research leader I was responsible for achieving its cutting edge position in war and conflict heritage as VU co-leader of large NWO progrsamme Dynamics of Memory and several European research programs, among them the Terrorscapes networking project for which I was awarded together with Georgi Verbeeck in Rome the Euromediterraneo Prize 2013. Since 2016 I was leading the European collaborative research projct Accessing Campscapes, granted in the HERA Uses of the Past Call (iC-ACCESS) on inclusive strategies for European conflicted heritage, and the Horizon 2020 Marie-Curie ITN grant as PL of 'Curating of the Past' in the collaborative Critical Heritage for the Future of Europe (CHEurope) project.
Inaugural 2012 (NL) / Farewell Speech 2024 (NL / ENG / Video)