The Organizing Committee is pleased to announce that the Keynote Speaker for the Closing Session of the VI CHAM Conference will be Dr Esther Breithoff, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Archaeology and Heritage and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.
Dr Esther Breithoff is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Archaeology and Heritage and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously held postdoctoral positions at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Dr Breithoff's research has ranged across a number of different topics—including war, natural and cultural heritage, nuclear and petroleum industries, dictatorships and biobanking—but traces a common set of interests in the relationships between conflicts, resources, recycling and rights across more-than-human worlds in the Anthropocene. She is currently PI on two UKRI-funded projects, Material Memories: Archaeology, Heritage and Human Rights Violations in South America and Southeast Asia (2019-23) and Ecologies of Violence: Heritage and Conflict in More-Than-Human Worlds (2023-26).