Invited Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Cornelius Holtorf

Heritage Futures I Archaeology, School of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University.

Cornelius Holtorf studied prehistoric archaeology, social anthropology and human osteology in German and the UK, gaining his PhD in Archaeology from the University of Wales in 1998. He is currently Professor of Archaeology and holds a UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden (see https://lnu.se/en/unescochair). He is also a Co-Investigator in the Heritage Futures project based at UCL and directs the Graduate School in Contract Archaeology (GRASCA) at Linnaeus University.

Meg Nömgård

Director of the Land of Legends, Sweden.

Meg is the director of The Land of Legends, which is run by The Storytelling Network of Kronoberg which is an association/NGO that was formed in 1990 with the aim of encouraging storytelling and highlighting the treasure of legends from the area of Kronoberg, South Sweden. The Land of Legends includes among other things “The Museum of Legends” (Sagomuseet) a yearly Storytelling festival and Legendary places in the landscape. Since 2014 the association is accredited to provide advisory services to UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and in March 2017 the Swedish government, decided to nominate The Land of Legends to UNESCO’s Register of Good Safeguarding Practices for Intangible Cultural Heritage (answer from Unesco will be given at thirteenth session of the Committee in November 2018). In 2016, Meg was awarded the Swedish UNESCO prize, handed out, for the first time, by the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO, this for her efforts to strengthen and develop UNESCO related activities in Sweden. She has participated in UNESCO courses to become an instructor for the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Meg is a museologist, who has previously worked (to mention a few) for The National Heritage Board of Sweden with Sweden’s world heritage sites, at The County Museum of Kalmar as a curator with international focus on ”Time Travels” and oral history and at historical sites own by The National Property Board of Sweden. She is also a storyteller, who love to tell everything between the tales from ancient time up to modern stories.

Neel Kamal Chapagain

Associate Professor and Director, Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India.

Neel is an architect and heritage professional from Nepal, who is currently the Director of the Centre for Heritage Management at Ahmedabad University in India. He began his work at Ahmedabad University in developing a Masters Degree Programme in Heritage Management where the emphasis is on integrating tangible and intangible as well as natural and cultural heritage discourses and practices. Along with the Masters programme, he has also been chairing an international conference series on Heritage Management Education and Practice, and has been instrumental in setting up the Journal of Heritage Management. Previously he worked in Nepal, Bhutan as well as USA. Along with his regular academic and professional engagements, he also coordinates a publication series titled ‘Reflections on the Built Environment and Associated Practices’ from Nepal, of which two volumes have been published and third volume is in its final stage. Earlier he co-edited (with Kapila Silva) ‘Asian Heritage Management: Contexts, Concerns and Prospects’ (Routledge 2013). He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), an Architecture Doctorate from University of Hawaii – Manoa (USA), and a Bachelors in Architecture from Tribhuvan University, Nepal.

He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the UNESCO Category Centre for World Natural Heritage Management and Training for the Asia Pacific Region at Dehradun, India.

Kelly Diapouli

Art director of Eleusis 2021 European Capital of Culture.

Kelly is the artistic director of Eleusis 2021 European Capital of Culture, having been involved in the establishment of the central idea and the artistic vision throughout the course of Eleusis’ bid for ECoC. She studied Theatre Studies and is a cultural manager with 15 years of experience in the fields of cultural networking, international cultural cooperation, as well as of direction and organisation of international programmes and events. Between 2004 and 2008, she worked in these fields for the Hellenic Culture Organisation – Cultural Olympiad and thereafter continued to do similar work for the Civil Non-Profit Company “busart“, of which she is a founding member, since 2009. She holds a degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Athens and European Cultural Policy and Administration from the University of Warwick (UK). She is an Onassis and Fulbright Foundation scholar, a member of the Alumni Network of the Festival Academy of the European Festivals Association (EFA), a member of the Young Cultural Innovators Forum of Salzburg Global and a member of the Advisory Board of IETM international network for contemporary performing arts and other bodies.

Evanthis Hatzivassiliou

Professor of Post-war History, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Athens.

Evanthis was born in 1966. He received his MA and his Ph.D. in International History from the London School of Economics in 1989 and 1992 respectively. He currently serves as Professor (Post-war History) and as head of the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Athens. He is a member of the Academic Committee of the Foundation of the Greek Parliament for Parliamentarianism and Democracy; the chairman of the Academic Council of the Constantinos Karamanlis Institute for Democracy; a Fellow of the Eleftherios Venizelos Foundation; and a member of the Greek-Turkish forum. His recent publications include:

  • Greek Liberalism: the Radical Trend, 1932-1979 (Athens: Patakis, 2010). In Greek.
  • NATO and Western Perceptions of the Soviet Bloc: Alliance Analysis and Reporting, 1951-1969 (London: Routledge, 2014)
  • The NATO Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society, 1969-1975: Transatlantic Relations, the Cold War and the Environment (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017).

Donald Kunze

Professor of Architecture and Integrative Arts at Penn State University.

Donald Kunze has taught architecture theory and criticism at Penn State University since 1984. He studied architecture at N. C. State University (B. Arch.) and received his Ph.D. in cultural geography at Penn State in 1983. His articles and lectures have engaged a range of topics dealing with the poetic dimensionalizing of experience of boundary conditions. His book on the philosophy of place of Giambattista Vico studied the operation of metaleptic imagination and memory.

He is currently working on the idea of “the secondary” in architecture, art, literature, and film. This is about the presence of other points of view in works where a main point of view is constructed to allow for shifts in the “parallax view.” His next work will be a novel about the architecture of the dream and dreams of architecture, addressing the psychoanalytic construction of boundary conditions, particularly in relation to autoeroticism, hysteria, and “primal terms” that give us access to the unconscious.

Field Experts

Marilena Alivizatou

Honorary Senior Research Associate, UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies.

Marilena specialises in the critical examination of intangible heritage and holds a PhD in Heritage and Museum Studies from University College London (2009). For her doctoral research, which was funded by the Greek Scholarship Foundation (IKY) and UCL, she used the method of comparative museum ethnography and focused on space and discourse analysis to investigate how the concept of intangible heritage is interpreted in five ethnographic museums in Europe, Oceania and America.

Marilena is Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies and was Senior Research Associate (2013-17) and Teaching Fellow in Museum and Heritage Studies (2009-12) at UCL. She has worked as researcher and consultant on intangible heritage with museums and heritage institutions in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia and interned at UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage section and ICOM in Paris in 2004, where she worked on the Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage. She has an MA in Cultural Heritage Studies with a dissertation on intangible heritage in performing art museums (UCL 2004, distinction) and an undergraduate degree in Theatre Studies with a dissertation on Greek popular theatre (Athens University 2003, distinction).

She is the author of Intangible Heritage and the Museum: New Perspectives on Cultural Preservation (Left Coast Press/ Routledge, 2012) and several papers on intangible heritage. She is currently researching participatory methods for safeguarding intangible heritage by looking at the concept of community participation with perspectives from critical heritage, museology and participatory development.

Stavroula-Villy Fotopoulou

Director of Modern Cultural Heritage Directorate, General Directorate of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports.

Villy was born and grew up in Kalamata, Greece. She got her Bachelor’s Degree in Archaeology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She got a Master’s Degree in Contemporary History from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, on collective memory and management of cultural heritage. She also got a Master’s Degree in Folklore from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, on life-stories and gender.

She works in the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, after graduating from the National School of Public Administration. She has served in various positions since 1996; she is Director of Modern Cultural Heritage since 2014. She has represented the Ministry of Culture in UNESCO, the EU and several bi-lateral or regional meetings as expert in cultural management.

Maria-Daphne Papadopoulou

Head of the Legal Department of the Hellenic Copyright Organization.

Daphne, after becoming a member in the Bar Association in Greece, worked as a fellow researcher in the Law Centre of University of Houston, USA. After that she was employed by international law firms in Germany (Taylor Wessing, PricewaterhouseCoopers Veltins and Simmons & Simmons) dealing with IP issues and new technologies, writing at the same time her Doctoral Thesis on Copyright. Returning to Greece, Daphne has been working as a counsellor at law at the Hellenic Copyright Organization, while at the same time worked as a freelance attorney consulting on copyright and general IP issues. Since May 2017 Daphne is the Head of the legal department of the Hellenic Copyright Organization. She is a member in many committees and a national expert in groups for copyright and IP. Daphne is an author of numerous contributions in books and articles (in Greek, English and German), has presented many papers in national and international conferences and gives lectures on copyright issues.

Ioanna Tzavara

Cultural Management, Directorate of Modern Cultural Heritage, Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports.

Ioanna holds an MA in Cultural Management with a thesis on Ecomuseums.  She works at the Directorate of Modern Cultural Heritage of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports, at the Department of Intangible Cultural Heritage.  Current professional interests, as part of the Directorate’s activities, include the enrichment of the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage as well as the elaboration of proposals for UNESCO’s International Lists of ICH.  She is also a member of the task group formed by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports and the Agriculture University of Athens, in order to give prominence to the intangible cultural aspect of the Greek agricultural heritage.

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