About Us

Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices (CHAMP) is the new interdisciplinary collaborative for the critical study of cultural heritage and museums in the global context. Its mission is to facilitate and coordinate research, workshops, lectures, and coursework (for the Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, Graduate Certificate in Heritage Studies, and related disciplinary seminars). CHAMP’s principal goal is to critically examine the articulation and representation of cultural identity on local and worldwide scales and to interrogate theories of heritage and museum practice that emerge from them. CHAMP’s faculty seek to promote sustainable practices at heritage sites and museums that are sensitive to competing political, economic, and religious claims. With the participation of faculty from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, CHAMP innovatively combines intellectual analysis with real-world application.

As countries are increasingly connected through travel, migration, media, and the internet, cultural heritage sites that formerly were meaningful within local contexts and preserved by virtue of their isolation are now suffering damage as a result of tourism, environmental degradation, and the commodification of culture in the globalizing world. At the same time, there is growing awareness that while heritage is necessary for the articulation of identity among resident peoples, it can also be a basis for conflict and even war. CHAMP recognizes the urgent need for study, mediation, and mitigation.

Like the buildings and landscapes of cultural heritage sites, museums also have become major tourist destinations, often serving as dynamic engines for economic development in their regions. Museums take many forms: object collections contained within a building, open-air historic sites, and sites for the performance of “intangible” heritage. Museums are crucibles for cultural production and the formation of social consciousness and identity. CHAMP addresses the politically, economically and culturally sensitive world of museum work today.

CHAMP is supported by the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Center for Global Studies, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Landscape Architecture. Its participating faculty currently come from Anthropology; Architecture; Art History; Education; History; Landscape Architecture; Library and Information Science; Recreation, Sport and Tourism; Urban and Regional Planning; and the Krannert Art Museum and Spurlock Museum.