Chiara is Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, based in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is an internationally active researcher investigating the intersection between contemporary experiences and public uses of the past, identity building and politics in the digital age. Chiara has spent over a decade developing interdisciplinary teaching, research, impact, and public engagement activities in this area, with the aim to generate research-led innovation with social purpose. Her most recent book, Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding populism through big data (2022), is the first to leverage millions of social media data points to examine the ways in which people’s understanding of the pre-modern past shapes political identities. Bonacchi is also the co-founder of the MicroPasts platform for heritage crowdsourcing, member of the international executive committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and of the Higher Education Academy.
Chiara Bonacchi
