Together with Shanade Barnabas and Manuela Ritondale, I co-convened this full-day workshop as a founding step toward establishing the Netherlands Chapter of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies. Held at the University of Groningen, the event brought together scholars and practitioners from across the Netherlands to develop a shared agenda for critical heritage research. Keynote lectures by Hester Dibbits (Reinwardt Academy) and Cindy Zalm (Wereldmuseum Amsterdam) opened the conversation, followed by group discussions on how heritage spaces are shaped by — and in turn shape — social, cultural, and political relations.

Written for the journal Re:vize as part of a special issue on Women and Work, this public essay draws on my MSCA Post-doctoral research to explore what museums do — or fail to do — with the material legacy of dissolved female convents. When monasteries were secularized across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, their sacred objects entered museum collections as supposedly gender-neutral artifacts. This essay asks what is lost when that happens, and whose history and work disappears with it.

This volume — the first comprehensive monograph on Conques’ monastery — charts the transformation of this extraordinary medieval site from a monastic center to a modern cultural heritage across nine centuries. I contributed a co-authored, peer-reviewed chapter on the medieval sacred landscape of the Conques monastery, examining how the surrounding territory was perceived, imagined, and represented in textual and material sources. The book is the principal outcome of the four-year MSCA Horizon project Conques in the Global World: Transferring Knowledge from Material to Immaterial Heritage (2020–2024), to which I was a contributing researcher.

What do stock images of AI actually tell us about how we imagine data and the human body? In this collaborative article with Alberto Romele and Dario Rodighiero, I contributed to strengthening the art historical and methodological framework — bringing Panofsky’s iconology and Didi-Huberman’s symptomatic perspective to bear on a quantitative analysis of around 7,500 Shutterstock images. The result is a reading of these images not as mere illustration but as symptoms of a datafied worldview — one that ends with an unexpected observation about the dominance of blue.

Together with Andrew Irving, Shanade Barnabas, and Lidewijde de Jong, I co-convened this symposium as part of the Groningen Heritage Network, bringing together different disciplines engaging in heritage research — from archaeology and spatial sciences to environmental studies. I also presented my research on gendered aspects of museum collections and their histories. The event was organised in partnership with the Rudolf Agricola School’s Environmental Heritage Research Group and marked an important step in building a cross-disciplinary heritage community at the University of Groningen.

When female monasteries across Europe were dissolved during secularization in the 18th and 19th centuries, their objects and spaces entered a new process of heritage-making — one that systematically obscured their histories as women’s institutions. My MSCA project investigates this gendered history of museums and the collections they built from former female convents, asking how the dispossession of women’s ownership became embedded in the way these collections are displayed and interpreted today. Using the Essen Cathedral Treasury as a primary case study, I am developing the first transdisciplinary analysis of this collection from a gendered perspective, with the aim of proposing strategies for transforming how such collections are represented — applicable to similar institutions across Europe.

This study explores the Liber Miraculorum sanctae Fidis, a collection of stories recording the miraculous deeds of St Foy, the patron saint of Conques. It examines the significance of the precise geographical references in the text and analyzes the motivations and perspectives of the multiple authors who compiled the Liber Miraculorum in the eleventh century. By developing a topographical map of the mentioned locations, the study investigates the relationship between the monastic community, their patron saint, and the surrounding lands.

It specifically focuses on the northeastern region of Conques and proposes that the emphasis on miracles and the construction of chapels in this area was related to the pilgrimage boom in the mid-eleventh century and served as a strategy to control the arrival route of pilgrims. The study concludes that the Liber Miraculorum and similar sources are valuable for reconstructing medieval pilgrimage routes and discussing their tangible and intangible heritage.

An interactive digital tool accompanies the article, enabling users to explore different topographical and historical layers of the Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis.

This symposium and workshop centred on religious objects that have been permanently or temporarily musealized.

The tension between the secular space of the museum and the religious nature and uses of many of the objects they display and preserve has been noted by several scholars. Much contemporary writing on religion in museums tends however to centre on the social and performative dimensions of the museum space, rather than on the material aspects of the objects themselves.

This symposium posed fresh questions on the status of such objects by exploring the intersection between religious artworks and transcultural approaches to material and visual culture.

Speakers: Hans Peter Hahn (Frankfurt), Alžběta Filipová (Brno/Tiblisi), Lieke Wijnia (Utrecht), Nathalie Cerezales (Paris), Hermine Pool (Amsterdam), Liesbet Kusters & Ellen Descamps (Leuven), Andrew Irving (Groningen), Sabina Rosenbergová (Groningen).

The project focuses on the sacred space and landscape around the important medieval pilgrimage site of Conques (Conques-en-Rouergue, department Aveyron) and is part of the research project Conques in the Global World: Transferring Knowledge from Material to Immaterial Heritage. The research builds on numerous studies by art historians on Conques dealing with the sacred space of the church, as well as the reliquary statue of Saint Foy and its function in (para)liturgical rituals, especially processions held in and around the sanctuary.

To these studies, this project adds a perspective focused on the landscape around Conques, understood as a site of interaction between geographical reality and imaginary space, and as an important part of the religious experience of medieval believers. In particular, the research seeks to interpret the sacred space and landscape around the monastery with the help of a large corpus of written sources, mainly Latin hagiographies situated in Conques (10th–12th centuries). Despite the many topoi encountered in these hagiographies, the essential elements of historical reality and the period’s perception of sacred space and landscape are captured; at the same time, fundamental changes in this perception are revealed by variations among the medieval redactions of these texts.

The project combines these textual sources with material evidence and archaeological data, incorporating more experimental methods using sensorial data and embodied experience. It aims to produce a closer understanding of how the landscape around the monastery of Conques was perceived in the medieval period and what role it played in the experience of arriving pilgrims.

Is it possible to reconstruct the feeling of a medieval pilgrim walking towards the sacred? No, it is not. And yet, the experimental project Migrating Art Historians sought to delve into this impossibility. Journeying by foot over more than 1500km, twelve modern pilgrims—students and scholars from Masaryk University—reached some of the most impressive artistic monuments of medieval France.

One year later, this book presents their intellectual, human, and art historical theoretical know-how, transformed by the experience of their bodies. In this context, exhausted and activated bodies became instruments asking new questions to medieval artworks and sources. Structured as a walk along pilgrimage routes, this book presents firstly the landscape, followed by liminal zones, before leading the reader inside medieval churches and ultimately towards the sacred. Original scientific art historical research combines with personal engagement. What emerges is the subject confronted with the experience of medieval art.