Chiara Bonacchi is Senior Lecturer in Heritage at the University of Stirling. She is a leading expert in digital heritage and the study of public experiences and values of the past and how these relate to contemporary identities and decision-making. She has led or co-led a broad portfolio of collaborative research projects in the UK, Europe and the Middle East including the major AHRC-funded project Ancient Identities in Modern Britain project on which she was CI (2016-2019).
Her recent work has concentrated on advancing current knowledge and understanding of the ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies of digital heritage in a world of big data, on online co-production of collections and knowledge and on the politics of the past.
She advocates for the application of data-intensive methods in heritage studies, which, combined with qualitative approaches, can help to address real world social challenges and dialogue with policy more effectively.
Chiara is currently completing a special issue of Big Data and Society on Heritage in a World of Big Data and two monographs on Heritage and Nationalism: Using Big Data to Deconstruct Populist Narratives (UCL Press) and Public Archaeology in Europe (Cambridge University Press).
Chiara is PI for the University of Stirling on the JPI CURBATHERI project, leading on WP3. She will contribute her expertise on ways of capturing intangible values of heritage online and offline, and on the curation of urban environments including through building archaeology.