Reported by Philip Yanakiev, class of 2027
On Tuesday, August 26, 2025, faculty, staff, and students gathered at the library for the launch of the Heritage Lab, co-led by Professor Kolleen Guy and Professor Jung Choi. Professor Guy opened the session by introducing the lab and its inspiration – the UNESCO grant-funded project “Museums as Transnational Heritage Hubs: Civilian War Victims, Memory Networks, and Global Recognition,” which she co-leads with Professor Jay Winter of Yale University and with Professor Yujie Zhu of Australian National University. Yujie Zhu started his keynote lecture with the open question, “What is Heritage?”
Responses from the audience included conservation, tradition, and culture. Professor Zhu expanded on these replies by arguing that heritage means the preservation of one’s culture, similar to the permanence of frescoes, sculptures, and monuments of the past. Then, he introduced the critical approach to heritage – that is, the interdisciplinary process that makes meaning of the past, place, identity, emotion, politics, rights, and power. The critical approach to heritage involves collecting and reproducing the past as well as forgetting and destroying it, where needed. Heritage spans a plethora of disciplines, from anthropology and history to medicine and law, and necessitates a perspective that goes beyond single nations.
The two case studies, funded by the UNESCO grant, illustrate the shift from understanding heritage as belonging to a national state to a transnational memory network. The first is a network of the voices of “comfort women” – sexual slaves used by the Japanese across East Asia during Japan’s in the Second World War. Museums, archives, community groups, and digital platforms link the stories of women in hardship during the time period. Similarly, the experiences of European Jewish refugees who sought a haven in Shanghai between 1931 to 1945 also create a network of oral history and collective memory across the world. Professor Zhu concluded the lecture by emphasizing the importance of these stories because they represent the “Civilianisation of War” – a shifting focus from military targeting to the targeting of civilians, and the untold parallel stories of the latter – and how their telling in the transnational context contributes to their remembrance in the global cultural memory.
Beyond the keynote lecture, the goal of the HRC-funded Heritage Lab is to serve as a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration at DKU. Co-led by Professor Guy and Choi, the lab will bring to practice the principles outlined in the lecture. Specifically, the lab will train students in heritage mapping, digital storytelling, and curatorial practice, in partnerships with faculty members and international collaborators. The lab’s goals will be to tell the stories of displacement, survival, and solidarity through these means as well as investigate how existing museums, media, and aesthetic practices evoke empathy, amplify marginalized voices, and create transnational spaces of remembrance. Its realized projects will experiment with new exhibition formats, both through visuals and through sound, immersive digital media, and collaborative research that aims to bring silenced histories into public view. Faculty and students are encouraged to bring projects they have been working on to the lab’s directors.
