Sharon Macdonald
Research Profile
Professor of Social Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences, she's primarily concerned with questions of how cultural heritage is made, re-made, used and experienced and how this variously invokes, substantiates or challenges collective identities and memories. She's interested in the making of heritage policy and the workings of cultural institutions; and in what happens when policy meets practice, past meets present, and aspirations meet materials.
Her research has focused especially on Europe, though she's also interested in questions concerning the globalization of heritage. She carries out ethnographic fieldwork, involving participant-observation and interviews, as well as archival and documentary research. Her fieldwork has been in Scotland, England and Germany; and she has looked variously at those involved in deciding what gets to count as heritage, those involved in making and presenting it - such as tour guides, as well as at implicated communities and visitors. Recently she finished a book about negotiating Nazi architectural heritage in Nuremberg post-1945. This brought together historical and ethnographic work to explore some of the struggles, actions and inactions over time. It was part of a broader exploration of how to understand and cope with 'difficult heritage'. Her next project, Memorylands, is concerned with what she argues is an anthropologically rather particular - though also diverse - complex of ways of 'doing' identity, memory and heritage in Europe.
She is on the editorial boards of: International Journal of Heritage Studies, Memory Studies, Museum and Society, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures and Tourism and Cultural Change. She is a member of the SIEF working group on Cultural Heritage and Property and on the register of UNESCO experts on cultural heritage. As part of an interest in scientific heritage, as well as in questions about forms and design of public display, She's on the board of the Medical Museion in Copenhagen.
Research projects
•My Exhibition: designing for affective communication, personalisation and social experience, 2005-9
•Difficult heritage: negotiating the past in Nuremberg and Beyond
•Materializing Sheffield: Place, Culture, Identity, 2003-6
Events, conferences and seminars
Recent and forthcoming seminars and conference panels that I have convened include:
•Making European Heritage, Chimera, Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence and SoSS conference, March 2010
•Heritage Effects: Tangible and Intangible, Social Anthropology and Chimera workshop, February 2009
•Assembling and Reassembling Heritage panel, Culture and Citizenship CRESC conference, Oxford, September 2008
•Exploring Europe through Science and Technology Exhibits, co-convenor with Barbara Wenk and Morgan Meyer, Transcending 'European heritages': liberating the ethnological imagination, SIEF, University of Ulster, June 2008
The following recent and prospective keynote lectures indicate some of my areas of expertise and interest:
•'Museum Europe: negotiating heritage', SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore) annual conference Transcending 'European heritages': liberating the ethnological imagination, University of Ulster, June, 2008
•'Cosmopolitan Heritage', Globalized Heritage conference, Department of Anthropology and ethnography, University of Aarhus, December 2008
•'Difficult heritage: negotiating the Nazi past in Nuremberg and beyond', The Whitesell Lecture, University of Michigan, March 2009
•'World museums', Museums and Globalization, Inaugural London Debate, London School of Advanced Study, May 2009
•'Post-national museums?', keynote lecture, National Museums in a Transitional Age, Monash University Centre, Prato, Italy, November 2009
•'Museums and the globalization of culture', keynote opening lecture to the Deutscher Museumsbund (German Museums Association). European Capital of Culture Conference, Dortmund, May 2010
•'Museums and transnationality', keynote lecture to University of Applied Arts, Vienna, visit to London, June 2010
Supervision Areas
•The globalization of heritage, including 'world heritage' and the workings of international heritage organisations
•Ethnographic study of the making and reception of local or regional cultural heritage, especially (though not only) in Europe
•'Difficult heritage' - identities and conflicts in dealing with the past
•Tourism and the consumption of heritage
Current and Former PhD Students
•'Relentless dybbuk: the loss, the memory and the revival of Jewish life in Poland', Jan Lorenz (Rothschild-funded), 2008-
•'Examining the Twentieth Century as a historical memory in Chinese education', Chris Courtney (ESRC/BICC- funded), 2008-
•'Change and everyday practice at the museum: an ethnographic study', Jennie Morgan (SoSS-funded), 2007-
•'The fate of the nation: heritage, tourism and identity', Mads Daugbjerg - visiting PhD student from the University of Aarhus, 2008
•'Memory work, the house and social relations in an area of the North East of Italy', Maria Luisa Magnotti - visiting PhD student from the University of Verona, 2008
Relevant Publications
•Macdonald, S. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond, Routledge, 2009
•Macdonald, S. 'Unsettling memories: intervention and controversy over difficult public heritage', in Marta Anico and Elsa Peralta (eds) Heritage and Identity. Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World, London: Routledge, 2009, pp.93-104
•Macdonald, S. 'Reassembling Nuremberg, Reassembling Heritage', Journal of Cultural Economy, Vol.2, no.1-2, 2009, pp.117-34
•Macdonald, S. 'Museum Europe. Negotiating Heritage', Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, Vol.17, 2008, pp.47-65
•Anthropological Perspectives on Social Memory (co-edited with Helena Jarman and Petri Hautaniemi), special issue of Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 2006
•Macdonald, S. Companion to Museum Studies, New York/Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 (Choice academic book of 2007)
•Macdonald, S. Materializing Sheffield: Place, Culture, Identity, 2006
•Macdonald, S. 'Mediating heritage: tour guides at the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Nuremberg', Tourist Studies, 6(2), 2006, pp.119-38
•Macdonald, S. 'Words in Stone? Agency and Identity in a Nazi Landscape', Journal of Material Culture, 11(1/2) 2006, pp.105-126
•Macdonald, S. 'Undesirable heritage: historical consciousness and Fascist material culture in Nuremberg', International Journal of Heritage Research, 12(1) 2006, pp.9-28