Professor Laurajane Smith

Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies, Australian National University

Laurajane Smith is Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies at ANU, and a fellow of the Society for the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has had a career long interest in the politics of heritage making. She is founder of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and has been editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies since 2009. Prior to arriving at the ANU in 2010, she held the position of Reader in heritage studies at the University of York, UK, where she directed the MA in Cultural Heritage Management for nine years. Originally from Sydney, she taught Indigenous Studies at the University of New South Wales (1995-2000), and heritage and archaeology at Charles Sturt University (1990-1995). She also worked as a heritage consultant in south-eastern Australia during the 1980s.

Her key books include Uses of Heritage (2006) and Emotional Heritage (2021) and the edited volumes Intangible Heritage (2009) and Safeguarding Intangible Heritage (2019) both with Natsuko Akagawa, Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present (2018) with Margaret Wetherell and Gary Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Class (2011) with Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell, and Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous engagements (2011) with Geoff Cubitt, Ross Wilson and Kalliopi Fouseki and the forthcomming (2024) The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics with Gönül Bozoglu, Gary Campbell and Christopher Whitehead.

The case for the award of the Public anthropology award rests on her current project on Heritage and Reconciliation. This project re-conceptualises heritage from a standpoint of reconciliation. In doing so, it generates new understandings about how heritage and its management can contribute to reconciliation processes. The project combines Aboriginal, Maori and Western intellectual traditions in order to advance theoretical understandings of heritage and to examine its reconstructive power. It will produce models for practical implementation, including new conservation and management protocols. The project’s investigation of a new approach to heritage has the potential for profound social benefit.