Biography
Helaine Silverman is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy (CHAMP). Her research concerns the production and consumption of heritage sites as this engages tourism, marketing/branding, economic and social development, local and national imaginaries, performances of identity, community rights, and regimes of heritage management. She principally works in Peru, England Thailand on these issues. She and CHAMP colleagues have just launched a project in Illinois called “The Mythic Mississippi” that seeks to apply these interests locally. In addition to her own authored works on cultural heritage, tourism and museums, she is the editor/co-editor of Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America (2006), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (2007), Intangible Heritage Embodied (2009), Contested Cultural Heritage (2011), Cultural Heritage Politics in China (2013), Encounters with Popular Pasts (2015), Heritage in Action (2017) and Heritage of Death (2018). She serves on the editorial boards of various journals and is the co-editor of two book series: “Heritage, Tourism, and Community” (Routlege) and “Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Archaeological Heritage Management” (Springer). She is an expert member of ICOMOS’ International Scientific Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM) and ICOMOS’s International Scientific Committee on Cultural Tourism (ICTC).
