Helaine Silverman
Helaine Silverman
Anthropologist and co-director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices
Dr Helaine Silverman, who holds a Ph.D from the University of Texas, is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her secondary appointments are in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Program in Art History, Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, and Campus Honors Program. She also is a member of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. She is the Co-Director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices.
Her primary research interests include heritage theory and management, critical museum studies, tourism, cultural memory, identity, globalisation, nationalism, appropriations of the past, urbanism, architectural and landscape history, spatial theory, cultures of death, Southeast Asia, Central Andean archaeology, and complex societies.
Dr Silverman’s first career was as an archaeologist specialising in the Central Andes. Over the past 10 years her research has re-focused on the role of archaeology in the social/cultural construction of space, place, memory, and identity in contemporary nation-states, and how the nation-state, its official agencies and manifold constituencies, as well as the global tourism industry and popular media, produce a national past, inform contemporary national identities, and generate a national 'brand' through appropriation and representation of the past.
Dr Silverman applied this suite of interests to an ethnographic/applied archaeology project in Cuzco, Peru in 2003-2004, examining the municipality’s construction of a 'new Inca city', as undertaken through 'neo-Inca' embellishment of the historic centre accompanied by a strong cuzqueñismo discourse. She is currently working on a preliminary comparative project dealing with heritage sites, museums, and historic urban environments around the world. Her emphasis is on the intersections of local, national, and international heritage management practices with communities under conditions of globalisation and tourism. She hopes to move this research into a full-blown project in Southeast Asia.
She serves on the Editorial Board of Heritage Management and is an International Member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites-ICOMOS, an Expert Member of the ICOMOS-International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM), and an Associate Member of the ICOMOS-International Cultural Tourism Committee (ICTC).
Her teaching repertoire regularly includes Heritage Management, Museum Theory and Practice, Social Construction of Space, Archaeology and Popular Culture, Archaeology of Death, Tourist Cities and Sites, and Rise of Civilisation in Ancient Peru.
Dr Silverman is the editor of a book series for Left Coast Press entitled 'Heritage, Tourism and Community' and is the former editor of Routledge’s series 'Critical Perspectives on Identity, Memory and the Built Environment'.
She is the editor of the forthcoming titles, Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure and Exclusion in a Globalized World and the author of a chapter entitled 'Inscribing Tupac Amaru’s Martyrdom in Cuzco' in Heritage Cities, edited by D. Fairchild Ruggles (both published by Springer).
Her other published work includes Intangible Heritage Embodied (with D. Fairchild Ruggles); 'Embodied Heritage, Identity Politics and Tourism' in Archaeologies And Ethnographies: Iterations of ‘Heritage’ and the Archaeological Past (edited by Lena Mortensen and Julie Hollowell,); Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (with D. Fairchild Ruggles); 'Contemporary Museum Practice' in Cusco, Peru in Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics To Politics (edited by Philip Duke and Yannis Hamilakis); Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America.
She has also been published in, among others: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship, Anthropology and Humanism, The SAA Archaeological Record, American Anthropologist, Journal of Social Archaeology and Anthropology Today.
