Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor / Senior Lecturer in Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam. He teaches across heritage and memory, museum studies and artistic research, and is a member of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture.
Colin’s research critically examines heritage and museums through the lens of art and ecology. In 2020-21 he was project co-lead on Reimagining Museums for Climate Action, a design competition and research project that sought to inspire radical change in museums to address the climate crisis, culminating in an exhibition at COP26 in Glasgow. He regularly works with artists, designers, curators and others to develop creative research and critical pedagogy. He is currently Principal Investigator on two projects looking at the emergence and implications of new ecological approaches across the cultural sector.
Colin was previously an AHRC Research Fellow at UCL Institute of Archaeology. He was PI on the New Trajectories in Curatorial Experience Design project, which asked how emerging approaches to immersive and experiential design might contribute to critical heritage thinking and practice. He was also a Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the AHRC Heritage Priority Area project, and a Project Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects. He has worked as a heritage consultant internationally, specialising in curatorial planning and interpretation.
Colin is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020). He is editor of the journal Museums & Social Issues.
Critical Heritage Ecologies 