Research Projects

To conduct research, I use a wide range of qualitative methods: ethnography (both in-person and digital), interviews, archives, site visits, questionnaires, and more. I have designed and carried out a number of field research projects internationally—in Rwanda and Germany—and domestically, in the US territory of the Virgin Islands.

I’m interested, broadly, in how we use the remains of the past today. My research includes topics such as the difficult heritage of conflict, colonialism, and atrocity; cultural heritage ethics and politics; community engagement with heritage; memory and memorialization; museums and repatriation or restitution; development; and cultural diplomacy. I have worked with and on state institutions, civil society, and major organizations such as UNESCO, and served as an expert reviewer (invited by ICOMOS) for the World Heritage List.

Communities and Heritage on St. Croix

As a member of the Enduring Materialities of Colonialism project, I study  heritage on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. Based at Aarhus University in Denmark, the larger project focuses on the heritage of Danish colonialism on the island, which historically was a site of sugar production and enslavement. Under this umbrella, my research project looks at how the remains of sugar plantations are owned, controlled, managed, and accessed in the context of St. Croix's changing economy, demography, and landscapes.

Rwandan Solutions to Rwandan Problems

In collaboration with Heritage Sites Specialist David Nkusi from Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy, I looked at the relationship between local communities and heritage sites in a rural district of Rwanda. Our work asked what factors shape how people relate—or don’t relate—to heritage places, and how heritage could be managed to benefit rural Rwandans both socially and economically. We asked these questions with an eye to issues of decolonization, development, and ethics in heritage management.

Body Politics

Carried out while I was a postdoc at Linnaeus University, this project examined a collection of skulls from Rwanda, held in Berlin, in the context of cultural diplomacy. I used the collection’s repatriation—its return to Rwanda—to interrogate the shifting international dynamics between colonizer and formerly colonized. The project investigated repatriation as a tool for reshaping international relationships through heritage-based diplomacy. It went beyond  common questions about ethics and ownership of cultural property to ask how heritage diplomacy could actually help to reshape postcolonial relationships through changing the international balance of power.

A Country Without Culture is Destroyed

My PhD dissertation project, "A Country without Culture is Destroyed: Making Rwanda and Rwandans through Heritage," analyzed how the Rwandan state uses heritage to rebuild the nation and prevent the return of mass violence, while also using heritage to change the country's place in international post-colonial and post-conflict power dynamics. It traced a set of key ideas—value, dignity, unity, and development—in the state heritage sector. To do this research, I worked with the Institute of National Museums of Rwanda and the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, and was supported by funding from Fulbright as well as Stanford University. Publications from this project include articles on genocide memorialization, ideas about dignity and the nation, and modes of conservation and development in interaction with UNESCO.

Other Projects

I have researched Rwanda for more than a decade. My first work on the country was a master's thesis at the University of York,  "A Difficult Proof: Material Heritage, Tourism, and Morality at Rwanda's Genocide Memorials."

I also research and write on a contract basis. My projects at the Social Science Research Council included work on cultural heritage, conflict, and mass atrocities; China's engagements with Africa; rural radicalism in Africa; and more. Other contract work has included, for example, reviewing the scholarship on the heritage of conflict in Vietnam, focusing on the Vietnam/American War.