Chiara Bonacchi - Heritage and Nationalism

Online talk organised by the Loughborough University Nationalism Network (LUNN) on 15 February 2023.
How was the Roman Empire invoked in Brexit Britain and in Donald Trump’s United States of America, and to what purpose? And why is it critical to answer these kinds of questions? The talk will discuss how people’s perceptions and experiences of the ancient past shape political identities in the digital age. Drawing on an extensive amount of social media data, the talk will discuss the multiple ways in which politicians, parties and private citizens mobilise cultural, religious, racial and other aspects of the Iron Age, Roman and Medieval past of Britain and Europe to include/exclude ‘others’. The talk is based on Chiara Bonacci’s homonymous book.
Dr Chiara Bonacchi is Chancellor's Fellow in Heritage, Text and Data Mining and Senior Lecturer in Heritage at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the intersections between heritage, identity and the ‘politics’ of the past using both data-intensive and qualitative approaches. She is the receiver of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Archaeology (2022) and the author of the monograph Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (UCL Press, 2022). Chiara has led or co-led several UK-based and international research projects funded by UKRI, Leverhulme and the EU Commission. She is Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, Fellow of the Society of antiquaries of Scotland, Member of the RSE Young Academy and of the international executive committee of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies.