Prof Sharon Macdonald

Sharon Macdonald has been interested in museums since she was accidentally locked into the Pitt Rivers while a student. She is now Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Anthropology, with special reference to Museum and Heritage Studies, at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she has established the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH). The Centre works with a wide range of museums and heritage institutions, in Berlin and elsewhere. Among other projects, Sharon Macdonald directs the Contentious Collections work package of TRACES (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts) funded by the EU, and Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century, which includes the theme Transforming the Ethnographic, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her publications include Difficult Heritage (2009), Memorylands (2013), the four-volume International Handbooks in Museum Studies (as joint managing editor, 2015) and a special section of Museum Worlds called ‘Engaging Anthropological Legacies’ (as co-editor, 2017).