Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor of Memory and Museums at the University of Amsterdam (Jan 2021 – ). He teaches across heritage and memory, museum studies and artistic research, and is a member of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture.

Colin’s research focuses on critical-creative approaches to heritage, memory and museums. He is interested in how artists, designers, architects, writers and other creative practitioners engage with museums and heritage as spaces of critical enquiry. From 2020-21 he was project co-lead on Reimagining Museums for Climate Action, a design competition and research project that sought to inspire radical change in museums to address the climate crisis, culminating in an exhibition at COP26 in Glasgow.

Colin was previously an AHRC Research Fellow at UCL Institute of Archaeology. He was Principal Investigator on the New Trajectories in Curatorial Experience Design project (Feb 2019 – Jan 2021), which asked how emerging approaches to immersive and experiential design might contribute to critical heritage thinking and practice. He was also a Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the AHRC Heritage Priority Area project (Oct 2017 – Dec 2019), and a Project Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects (Jan 2016 – June 2017). He has worked as a heritage consultant internationally, specialising in curatorial planning and interpretation.

Colin is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and the co-editor of Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020). He is co-editor of the journal Museums & Social Issues (Oct 2020 – ).