Dr. Laurie Kalb Cosmo is a member of the new research group for Museums, Collections and Society formed by Prof. dr. Pieter ter Keurs at the Centre for Arts in Society (LUCAS) at the University of Leiden. An art and cultural historian by training, dr. Kalb has been a museum curator in the United States and most recently a member of the art history faculty of Temple University Rome, Italy, where she has taught courses in Museum History and Theory, Cultural Heritage Preservation, and Modernism, Art and Politics.
Her particular focus is the history of museums and collecting. As an affiliated scholar at the Centre for Global Heritage and Development, she studies three topics of current interest. First, the contested histories of monuments and memory related to the deconstruction of colonial collections in European museums and the American Black Lives Matter Movement. Second, the creative applications of digital heritage in museums, whereby technological advances encourage and inspire new ways of viewing and understanding historic art and artefacts. Last, she has an ongoing interest in the emergence of private museums in 21st century Europe and their particular types of museum practice and societal impact. She has also been engaged in online research of digital innovations that offer new ways of experiencing historic art.
