Tokie Laotan-Brown, President
Dr. Tokie Laotan-Brown is a distinguished Heritage Architect and Cultural Economist with over 13 years of global experience in heritage conservation, restoration, restitution of cultural objects and architectural documentation. As the founder of Merging Ecologies Studios UK & Ireland, she is at the forefront of integrating Afrocentric cultural landscapes with cutting-edge technology, including CAD, HBIM, 3D scanning, and photogrammetry, to develop innovative solutions for heritage preservation, restoration and rehabilitation. Her expertise spans a wide range of conservation projects, from World Heritage Nomination Dossiers to Conservation Area Character Appraisals and Cultural Landscape Assessments, all with a focus on re-inscribing ancestral narratives and fostering reciprocal relationships with place.
Currently, Dr. Laotan-Brown is a Lecturer at SUNY Cortland, where she teaches Cultural Studies and actively shapes the next generation of heritage professionals. Her leadership in the field extends to serving as an Expert Member of the International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes, ICOMOS-IFLA. She is also Curator of the "Moving African Landscapes" exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2023, where she emphasizes the importance of digital literacy for African communities in the realm of heritage conservation.
Dr. Laotan-Brown holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Techniques for the Conservation of Architectural and Environmental Heritage from the University of Nova Gorica and Università Iuav di Venezia. Her work has been recognized globally, including awards such as the Michael Ventris Award for Architecture 2023 and grants from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung & Endangered Wooden Architecture Programme (EWAP) Oxford Brookes University for her restoration and documentation projects in Nigeria.
A committed advocate for diversity and inclusivity in heritage practices, Dr. Laotan-Brown's numerous publications address marginalized heritages, African urban landscapes, and the intersections of cultural heritage and peacebuilding. She is also pioneering digital tools, such as the ala ile app, to support Afrocentric design in cultural landscapes. Through her teaching, research, and global advocacy, she continues to shape the future of heritage conservation, contributing to international dialogues on sustainability, indigenous knowledge systems, and the protection of cultural heritage in marginalized communities.
Jessica Mace, Secretariat Officer
Jessica Mace, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. She is an art and architectural historian and, since 2015, has been the Editor in Chief of the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. Her current research interests involve industrial heritage, including the heritage of company towns in Canada and the very concepts of heritage. She is the co-author of the book Identity on the land: Company towns in Canada (Patrimonium, 2020) and co-editor of Les communautés patrimoniales | Heritage Communities (Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2019). Mace has also been the co-organizer of two International Conferences of Young Researchers in Heritage (2017 and 2019) and was a member of the executive organizing committee for the ACHS 2016 conference in Montreal.
Myriam Joannette, Vice-President | Conferences and Events
Myriam Joannette, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal and an associate researcher at the Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage. Her research mainly focuses on the links between communities and heritage as a vector of development. She is particularly interested in the requalification of heritage buildings in urban space and their reuse as alternative creative spaces. Trained in tourism, she is also interested in tourist imaginaries as representations of urban and rural spaces. She co-edited the books Heritage and local development (PUQ, 2024) and Heritage communities (PUQ, 2019)
She is also involved in national and international organizations related to heritage and architecture, notably as vice-president-conference for the Association for Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) and the Association for the Study of Architecture in Canada (SÉAC). She is also a member of the Urban Planning Advisory Committee (CCU) of the southwest borough, in Montreal, Canada.
Naomi Oosterman, Vice-President | Chapters
Naomi Oosterman is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies and an affiliated researcher of the research group Heritage under Threat, part of the Centre for Global Heritage and Development. Her research interests cover the illicit trade in arts and antiquities (with a particular focus on Latin America), the policing of art and heritage crime, and the concepts of critical heritage, coloniality, and decoloniality. She is the editor (with Dr. Donna Yates, Maastricht University) of the volumes Crime and art: Sociological and criminological perspectives of crimes in the art world and Art Crime in ContextOpen. Currently, she is working on a volume (with Camila Malig Jedlicki and Dr. Rodrigo Christofoletti) titled Negotiating Decolonisation in Latin America: Colonial Heritage, Conflict, and Contestation, set to be published in mid-2023.
Ali Mozaffari, Vice-President | Communications
Fellow of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and Senior Research Fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University
Ali Mozaffari, PhD, is Senior Fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Australia. His current research interests include geopolitics of the past, culture and the built environment with a specific focus on West Asia. His publications include Heritage Movements in Asia: Cultural HeritageActivism, Politics, and Identity (edited volume with Tod Jones, Berghahn 2020),Development, architecture and the formation of heritage in late-twentieth century Iran: A vital past (Manchester University Press 2020),World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae (Routledge 2016), and Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place (IB Tauris 2014). His books and papers have been translated into Persian.
Mozaffari is the founding co-editor of Berghahn’s series Explorations in Heritage Studies. His research website isheritageinwestasia.com.
Carsten Wergin, Vice-President | Membership
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies
Carsten Wergin trained at Goldsmiths College and the University of Bremen. After spending a few years at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg and the University of New South Wales (Sydney), he joined Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg in 2014. His anthropological work is located at the intersections of heritage, culture, and ecology, with regional foci in Australia, the Indian Ocean, and the islands and beaches of the European Ultraperiphery.
Plácido González Martinez
EU representative for GDPR purposes
Ph.D. Architect and Urban Planner, Professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji University in Shanghai, and Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Universities (Eastern Scholar). He is the Executive Editor of the journal Built Heritage, co-published by Springer Nature and Tongji University Press. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Iberian Docomomo Foundation, a founding member of the collective research GAMUC studying Spanish colonial architecture and urbanism in Africa, and a former member of the Advisory Board of the Spanish National Plan for the Conservation of 20th Century Heritage, which he drafted in 2014. Since he moved to Shanghai in 2016, his research interests have extended to the challenges of built heritage conservation in China in the framework of globalization. He has researched and published extensively on built heritage conservation and modern architectural history. His works include the book In Light of Hilberseimer (awarded the 1st Prize for Research of the 2018 Spanish Architecture Biennale) and articles in journals like Cities, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Journal of Urbanism, Space, and Polity, Journal of Urban Design and Docomomo International Journal.
Deepak Chhabra
Deepak Chhabra is an Associate Professor in the ‘Tourism Development and Management’ division of the School of Community Resources and Development (at Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA) who holds expertise in economic viability of special interest tourism and sustainable management and marketing of culture and heritage. She also serves as a Global Futures Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, Arizona State University. Her research specially centers on transformative paradigms, authenticity and authentication of heritage, and developing smart and sustainable marketing strategies to promote social, cultural, and economic equity/capital in local, regional, and global communities. She has authored more than sixty articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has also authored and edited several books. She recently authored a book titled ‘resilience, authenticity and digital heritage tourism.’ Her ‘in press’ books include 'sustainable development and resilience of tourism’ (co-edited) and ‘sustainable marketing of transformative heritage tourism’ (edited). She is also serving as a specialty editor for a ‘cultural heritage and authenticity in tourism’ section for the Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism journal.
Duane Jethro
Duane Jethro
Duane Jethro is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in analyzing the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures.
A graduate of Utrecht University, he was a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town between 2020 and 2022 and pursued a research project that takes a multiperspectival approach to the loss and salvage of the University of Cape Town Jagger Library and its collections after a devastating fire in April 2021. He was co-curator (with Michaelis Galleries curator Jade Nair) of the Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition in April 2022, and co-organised a symposium, After the Fire: loss, archive and African Studies with Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative postdoctoral research fellow Alirio Karina.
Between 2019 and 2020 he worked as a researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, CARMAH, at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which was founded and directed by Professor Sharon Macdonald. And he is an Associate Research Fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town.
He has held a Alexander von Humboldt Georg Foster Post doctoral research fellowship (2017-19), and serves as ambassador scientist for the Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fellowship for South Africa. From 2023, he serves on the executive board of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies. He has published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Material Religion, African Diaspora and Tourist Studies. He is an editor of the journal Material Religion and serves on the editorial board of the journal Museums and Social Issues. His book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power is published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Alexandra Dellios
Alexandra Dellios is an oral and public historian in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Her research considers the public and oral history of migrant and refugee communities in Australia and their experiences of settlement and working and family life. She has published on child migration, popular representations of multiculturalism, immigration centres and hostels, and public history practices and cultural heritage management in Australia. She is the author of Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing: 2017), editor of Memory and Family in Australian Refugee Histories (Routledge: 2019), and co-editor of Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage: Beyond and Between Borders (Routledge: 2020). She is Chair of the editorial board for Studies in Oral History and a founding member of the Australian Migration History Network.
Yiping Dong
Dr. Yiping Dong is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University. She is a trained architect and architectural historian. She has a Master's of Architecture Design and Theory and completed her Ph.D. in Architecture History and Theory from Tongji University in 2013. She is active in research related to built environment heritage.
She is the deputy secretary of the Urban and Rural Built Heritage Academic Committee under the Architectural Society of China, an academic member of IAHAC (Industrial Architecture Heritage Academic Committee) of China, a member of TICCIH (International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage); and a member of ACHS (Association of Critical Heritage Studies). Her research interests include Critical Heritage Study, Heritage theory, Chinese architectural history and theory in a global context, Industrial heritage, and heritage-led regeneration, Architectural design in context, and the adaptive reuse of buildings.
Harald Fredheim
Harald Fredheim is a Lecturer in Museum Studies in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. His research is focused on participatory practices in the heritage sector, most recently in relation to transforming unwanted museum objects into new things in collaboration with artists, exploring creative and collaborative approaches to heritage documentation and mapping participatory practices and their relationship to museum business models. Harald has published independently and collaboratively on topics including heritage values, heritage volunteering, conservation theory and practice, contemporary collecting and disposal, and public benefits from development-led archaeology. He has been a member of ACHS since 2016 and is one of the founding coordinators of the ACHS Early Career Researchers Network.
FOUNDING CHAIRPERSON
Laurajane Smith
PAST PRESIDENTS
Melissa F. Baird (2020-2024)
Lucie Morisset
Tim Winter