dr. L (Lise) Zurné

Biography

dr. Lise Zurné (Assistant Professor) is a visual anthropologist whose research explores memory and heritage, gender, war, embodiment and sensory ethnography. Throughout her work, she explores how historical knowledge is produced, negotiated and communicated, both within and beyond academia, and in the role of visual and embodied practices in engaging wider publics with the past.

Her doctoral research focused on historical re-enactment: the hobby of recreating historical events - often war - as pastime. Drawing on extensive participatory research among re-enactment communities in Indonesia and Europe, she examined how participants negotiate contested histories, including questions of (de)colonisation, gender representation and the embodiment of suffering. Her documentary The Feel of History (2017), which offers an intimate portrait of one of these communities, has been screened at eleven film festivals.

More recent work explores the relationship between heritage and the senses, colonial visual culture, as well as methodological challenges in ethnographic research, particularly concerning gendered vulnerabilities in the field.

Lise co-chairs the Working Group Safety in the Field at LOVA, the Dutch network for feminist anthropologists, and serves as editor-in-chief of Anthropology Matters.

At Erasmus University Rotterdam, she coordinates the MA Thesis trajectory and teaches courses in cultural history at both BA and MA level.