Prof. Dr. Andrea Witcomb is a Professor in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University, Australia, where she is the Deputy Director (Research) of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. Her work engages with the ways in which museums and heritage sites interpret difficult histories and facilitate cross-cultural encounters.

Andrea Withcomb is the author of Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge 2003), From the Barracks to the Burrup: The National Trust in Western Australia with Kate Gregory (UNSW Press 2010), co-editor with Chris Healy of South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture (Monash epress 2006; 2012) and, with Kylie Message, of Museum Theory (Wiley Blackwell 2015).

Her book chapters and journal articles have focused on the ways in which Australian museums have engaged with the history of migration and represented cultural diversity, and the representation of difficult histories such as colonial encounters and histories of war. Her focus is always on teasing out the ways in which objects and accompanying interpretation strategies can be used to build affective modes of interpretation aimed at supporting revisionist interpretations of the past.

Most of her publications have emerged out of research projects funded by the Australian Research Council with the last three projects concerning the management and interpretation of Australia’s extra territorial war heritage in South East Asia, the collecting sector’s engagement with cultural diversity and a project on the history of collecting practices in Western Australia.

Prof. Dr. Wayne Modest is the Head of the Research Center for Material Culture, the research institute of the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde and Africa Museum. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies in the faculty of humanities at the  Vrije University Amsterdam.

Modest was previously head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London, and Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography in Kingston, Jamaica. He has held visiting scholar positions at the Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University and the School for Museums Studies, New York University.

Wayne Modest’s work is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to material culture/museum collections. His research interests include issues of belonging and displacement; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices and difficult/contested heritage (with a special focus on slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism).

More recently Modest has been researching heritage and citizenship in Europe with special attention for urban life, and on ethnographic museums and questions of redress/repair.

Recent publications include: Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections, Collaborations (Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, with Viv Golding, 2013); ‘Anxious Politics in the European City’ (with Anouk de Koning, eds.). Special issue of Patterns of Prejudice 50(2). 2016. Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press ,with Tim Barringer, 2018 forthcoming).

Dr. Philipp Schorch is Head of Research at the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony, Germany, and Honorary Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia. Philipp’s research focusses on museums, material culture/history/theory, contemporary art and (post)colonial histories, the Pacific and Europe, and collaborations with Indigenous artists/curators/scholars. He received his PhD from the Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, and held fellowships at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg – Institute of Advanced Study, Georg-August-University Göttingen, and at LMU Munich (Marie Curie, European Commission). Philipp is co-editor of the volumes Transpacific Americas: Encounters and Engagements between the Americas and the South Pacific (Routledge, 2016) and Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship (Manchester University Press, 2018)

Dr. Pille Runnel is a Research Director and Deputy Director of the Estonian National Museum. Her research has dealt with new media and new media audiences, museum communication and participation at the public cultural institutions, visual and media anthropology. She has worked as a researcher at the Institute of Journalism and Commmunication, University of Tartu and carried out joint research projects with the Institute, including studying the generations and young people in the emerging information society and museum communication in the context of the information society.

Her research on museums, cultural heritage and museum audiences has resulted in a number of journal articles and book chapters as well as edited books, but has also been directly applied in the museum development. She is responsible for the research agenda of the Estonian National Museum and was supervising the production of new research-based permanent exhibitions of the Museum (opened at 2016), which have been visited by 300 000 visitors during the first year after the opening.

She has participated in a number of international studies and research projects, including: MEDIAPPRO and EU Kids Online (2009-2015); Making National Museums: comparing institutional arrangements, narrative scope and cultural integration – NaMu (2009); European National Museums: Identity Politics, The Uses of the Past and the European Citizen (EuNaMus) (2010-2013); COST research network „Transforming audiences, transforming Societies“ (2009-2015).