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Online lecture seriesLecture Series on the Topic of “Cultural Heritage”

Press Release No. 31/2021
13 April 2021

Online lecture series elucidates emotional dimensions of cultural heritage

What role do subjective assessments play in the way we perceive monuments from the past? How has our interaction with cultural heritage changed and what challenges are connected with the way we conserve and care for it? These questions will be raised by an online lecture series entitled “Cultural Heritage: Emotions and Significances”, to be hosted in the 2021 summer semester by the Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage (HCCH) and the Department of History at Heidelberg University. Cultural geographer Prof. Dr Thomas Schmitt from the HCCH will introduce the overall theme on 19 April 2021, to be followed by Prof. Dr Laurajane Smith from the Australian National University with a lecture entitled “Heritage, the Past and Emotions”. The lectures, transmitted by live streaming, will be in English or German and take place on Mondays, starting at 16:00.

There will be ten more sessions until mid-July 2021, each taking up different aspects of cultural heritage. Speakers will address the maintenance and the curated decay of museum pieces. They will discuss changing hierarchies of values and aesthetic considerations in the conservation of historic monuments and explore how monuments mould the collective cultural memory. Furthermore, the programme will take account of the iconoclastic events of the Black Lives Matter movement and the difficult cultural heritage that follows upon genocide, war, colonialism or racism. The lecture series at Heidelberg University will conclude on 12 July 2021 with a panel discussion taking up the tension between historical monuments, their conservation and their marketing for tourism. The speakers on the emotional dimensions of cultural heritage will, besides Heidelberg academics, include experts from Germany and abroad.

Anyone wishing to attend the online lecture series “Cultural Heritage: Emotions and Significances” needs to register by email. They should request the live streaming link no later than 12 noon on the respective Monday. Contact: Leila.Lemkecher@hcch.uni-heidelberg.de