Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor of Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam, where he leads the BA in Global Arts, Culture and Politics. Colin’s research focuses on the political and ecological dimensions of heritage and museums in the past and the present.

Susette Goldsmith is adjunct research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka where she completed her PhD. She is of Māori and Pākehā descent. Her research explores ways of perceiving, interpreting and safeguarding natural heritage in Aotearoa for which she received the RNZIH’s national Garden History Medal for 2026.

Sofia Lovegrove is a PhD candidate working at the intersection of critical heritage, memory and museum studies with a focus on colonial histories, decolonial and reparative practices, and the environmental humanities. Her PhD is part of the ERC-funded project Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination.

Esther Breithoff is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Archaeology and Heritage, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Deputy Director of the Carena Institute of Sustainable Archaeologies and co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on conflicts, waste and the environment across human and other-than-human worlds.

Layla Renshaw is an Associate Professor at Kingston University, London, where she teaches forensic archaeology and anthropology. Her research focuses on post-conflict investigations, and the relationship between human remains, forensic evidence, and memory. Her current projects examine both the commemoration of war dead and the enduring environmental legacies of conflict.

Claire Qianyu Zhou is a PhD student in heritage studies at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. Her research examines plant lives in urban heritage sites, focusing on multispecies memory, conservation politics and the lived afterlives of social change, with broader engagement in critical heritage studies and environmental justice.

Maria Suarez is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture as part of the Critical Heritage Ecologies research initiative. Her research project focuses on contemporary participatory art and heritage practices and their engagement in processes of social an ecological reparation, particularly in the context of post-conflict Colombia.

Dr David Francis is a research associate on the PITCH (Petrocultures’ Intersections with Cultural Heritage) project. He did his PhD on museum narratives at UCL and his postdoctoral research explores the dialogue between Chinese and European conceptions of heritage with a particular focus on Chinese minority-nationality identity and the botanic garden.

Maria Dragoi is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and the NHM. She studies the history of entomological science in the twentieth century and its ties to industry; and is concerned with the agency and possession of natural specimens in institutional spaces, particularly natural history museums.