Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik

Zentralinstitut der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Margareta von Oswald

Margareta von Oswald
Photo: (c) Marion Benoit

Research Assistant
inherit – heritage in transformation
Phone:
Email: margareta.von.oswald@hu-berlin.de

Margareta von Oswald is a socio-cultural anthropologist and curator, currently a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Studies inherit – heritage in transformation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she is responsible for engaging with question related to knowledge exchange.
Her research is concerned with museums and difficult heritage, asking how museums can be truly democratic places that effect change, and how historical collections become useful tools to better understand and address societal challenges.
In her monograph Working Through Colonial Collections. An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, she discusses the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism and its legacies in ethnological museums.
Other recent, open-access publications include the books The Resonant Museum. Berlin Conversations on Mental Health (ed. with Diana Mammana, Verlag der Buchhandlung Franz und Walther König, 2023), Awkward Archives. Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (ed. with Jonas Tinius Archive Books, 2022) and Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (ed. with Jonas Tinius, Leuven University Press, 2020). 

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