Independent Scholars Network
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Antonio Aimi
Graduated in Philosophy, Antonio Aimi is an americanist, who works on the interpretation of sources (texts and archaeological items) of Pre-Columbian Cultures, with an interdisciplinary approach (combining Anthropology, History, History of Literature, Aesthetic). He studied the Amerindian items of the eclectic Milanese collections of the XVI-XIX centuries; he has been studying the figurative language of the sculptures of the Proto-Classical cultures of West Mexico and he is following the issues raised in Europe from the opening or the transformation of ethnographical museums. Furthermore his research on the ethno-historical sources clarified that the “official” version of the Aztec interpretation of the conquest of Mexico is an invention of Cortés himself. From 2003 he is Adjunct Professor at the Università degli Studi di Milano, where he is co-director of several Projects and activities.
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Peter Aronsson
Professor in Cultural Heritage and the Uses of History, Culture Studies, Linköping University. He is PhD in history, Lunds University 1992. His dissertation dealt with the historic conditions for creating a durable democratic culture. The role of historical narrative and consciousness to direct action has been focused in recent research both as regards historiography proper and the uses of the past in the historical culture at large Currently he is co-ordinating several international projects exploring the uses of the past in National Museums and participating in a large project on historical consciousness, exploring the general concept of history.
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Joachim Baur
Joachim Baur is an independent curator and museum expert, based in Berlin. As co-founder and partner of the museum consulting firm “Die Exponauten” he currently develops the master plan for a new museum at the historic site of the famous Friedland refugee camp and curates an exhibition on migration and mobility at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum Dresden. He is the recipient of numerous grants and scholarships, among others from Fulbright, the German Historical Institute Washington DC and the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and has published on the history and theory of museums, migration history, representations of multiculturalism and the trans-/nationalization of memory.
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Paolo Caponi
Paolo Caponi graduated at the University of Milan in 1995 and held a doctorate in English Studies at the University of Venice. He has written mainly on Elizabethan Theatre and contemporary theatre and cinema, and has cooperated extensively with the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. He is currently Research Fellow at the University of Milan, where he teaches English Drama and English Culture. Since 2008 he has been in the scientific committee of the online research journal of the Università degli Studi di Milano «Altre Modernità. Rivista di studi letterari e culturali», headed by Prof. Emilia Perassi.
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Hugues de Varine
He is currently free lance consultant, specialized in local and community development, particularly the management of natural and cultural heritage by the local communities. He works mostly on local projects in Brazil, Portugal, Italy. He has been director of the International Council of Museums (1965-1974) and has occupied various positions in the French national administration (third sector, local development, urban regeneration. He has published various books on cultural imperialism, community initiative, and heritage as a ressource for local development (none of them translated into English).
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Anastasia Filippoupoliti
Anastasia Filippoupoliti is a lecturer in museum education at the Democritus University of Thrace (Greece). She is a historian of science by discipline and a professional museologist. She works on museology, museum education and exhibition design from the perspective of science museums and the history of science. She worked on these areas as a postdoctoral researcher in the Austrian Academy of Sciences researching also on art/science interrelationships.
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Andrew Flinn
Andrew Flinn is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Archives and Records Management MA programme in the Department of Information Studies at University College London. He has recently completed a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project ‘Community archives and identities’. His research interests include independent archives and community history projects, documenting activism and under-voiced communities, oral and public history, archival activism and democratizing heritage, user generated content and participatory approaches to archival practice, and the relationship between archives, heritage and identities.
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Gordon Fyfe
Fyfe’s research interests have been primarily focused on the historical sociology of modern art institutions and museums as well as on visual sociology. He has been a Managing Editor of The Sociological Review (Britain’s longest established journal of sociology) and has served on its board since 1975. He is a founding editor of Leicester University’s online and open access museums research journal Museum and Society, and is a member of the board of Museum History Journal. He is currently writing an introductory textbook on the subject of museum studies.
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Udo Gößwald
After having studied Political Science and European Ethnology in Marburg and Berlin, Germany, he worked in the field of curating and doing research for exhibitions on mainly historical topics. Since 1985 he's director of the Museum Neukölln in Berlin that focusses on Social History and Cultural History of the area. Migration, urban culture and the effects of European integration have become main aspects, that they follow at the museum. In 1987 the museum was awarded the Council of Europe Museum Prize. In the field of museology he teaches at the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Oldenburg in the Master Programme for Museum and Exhibition.
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Marek Edward Jasinski
Leader and Norwegian co-leader of over 15 various national and international research projects in Norway, Poland, Russia, Greece, Argentina, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Bulgaria financed by among others Norwegian Research Council, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Statoil, Hydro, Telenor, DNV, University of Tromsø, NTNU, counties administrations, and foreign partners. Recently Principal Investigator and Leader of the international project “Painful Heritage - Culturallandscapes of the Second World War in Norway. Phenomenology, Lessons and Management Systems” conducted by NTNU and Falstad Centre in co-operation with researchers from five European countries.
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Stefan Krankenhagen
Born in 1969, PhD in 2001 with a work about cultural forms of representation of the Holocaust at the Universities of Hildesheim and Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Between 2001 and 2005 lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin. 2005-2011 Associate Professor at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, teaching German and European cultural studies and history. Since 2011 Professor for Cultural Studies and Popular Culture at the University in Hildesheim. Main Research: Discourses of (Un-) Representability within Arts and Literature of the Holocaust, Popular Cultures and Pop Literature, Museum Studies.
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Amy K. Levin
Amy K. Levin is Chair of the English Department at Northern Illinois University, where she has also served as coordinator of Museum Studies and director of Women’s Studies. Her publications include “Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader” (Routledge, 2010) and “Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities” (Alta Mira, 2007).
Amy K. Levinhttp://www.engl.niu.edu/faculty_staff_directory/prof/levin.amy.shtml -
Sharon Macdonald
Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her main areas of research concern identity, heritage and museums. She has carried out anthropological fieldwork in the UK and Germany; and will begin new research in China in 2011. Her books include "A Companion to Museum Studies" (ed. 2006), "Exhibition Experiments" (co-ed. 2007) and "Difficult Heriage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond" (2009). She is currently completing "Memorylands: Heritage and Identity Complexes in Europe" (2012, Routledge).
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Carsten Paludan-Müller
Carsten Paludan-Müller is the General Director of The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research since 2003. Among the several previous positions, he was Head of the Museum Department of the National Danish Agency of Cultural Heritage, Head of the Monuments Department, and Director of the Museum of Culture History in Randers; from 2004 to 2010 he was board member and treasurer of the European Association of Archaeologists. Since 2006 he contributes to the Council of Europe's activities to follow-up the Faro-Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. Since 2009 he is external board member at The Institute for Archaeology, Conservation and History at The University of Oslo.
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Giovanni Pinna
Giovanni Pinna is a Professor in Paleontology and a museologist. Regarding his activity in the field of museum studies, worthy of note is his book “Museo. Storia di una macchina culturale dal cinquecento ad oggi” co-authored with Lanfranco Binni and published in 1980. This can be considered the first manual of museology published in Italy during the post-war period. Today he has turned his attention to the social aspect of museums, to the intellectual organisation and the mechanisms for the production of culture within these institutions, to the relations existing between museums and society, between museums and power. He is editor and director of the six-monthly journal Nuova Museologia on museum studies, which he founded in 1999. Giovanni Pinna have been actively involved in the non-governmental organization International Council of Museums (ICOM).
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Itala Vivan
Itala Vivan is Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, formerly at the School of Political Science of the State University of Milano, Italy. She has taught English and American Studies, and then Postcolonial Studies at American (Rutgers and Columbia) and Italian universities (Bari, Verona, Udine and Milano). She has also been Cultural Attache with the Italian Cultural Institute in London. She is author of several important publications in the field of Postcolonial Studies.
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Sheila Watson
Sheila Watson joined the Department (now School) of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in 2003 as a lecturer in History and Museum Studies, following a career in museums. She is currently Programme Director of Learning and Visitor Studies in Museums and Galleries (LVS), a Distance Learning MA, a programme she developed and edited. Her research interests include the making national museums and their roles in the nation state in Europe, English identities in museums, the senses and history in museums, and community history, in particular the meanings different communities make within a historical framework.