Wayne Modest is director of content at the National Museum of World Culture (a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, and Africa Museum) and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is also professor (by special appointment) of material culture and critical heritage studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. He is currently working on several publication projects, including, with Peter Pels, Museum Temporalities (forthcoming) and, with Chiara de Cesari, Curating the Colonial (forthcoming).
Susan Legêne is professor of political history at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and dean of the Faculty of Humanities. She has taught and published about culture and power, specifically about the deep impact of the colonial and imperial past on state formation, nation building, citizenship, and processes of inclusion, exclusion, and belonging in the postwar world of nations. Together with Wayne Modest and Rosalie Hans she is a member of the managementteam of the project Pressing Matter—Ownership, Value, and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums (2020–25). See also research.vu.nl/en/persons/susan-legene