Laurajane Smith is professor of Heritage and Museum Studies, and a fellow of the Society for the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has had a career long interest in the politics of heritage making. She is founder of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and has been editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies since 2009. She is co-general editor with Dr Gönül Bozoglu of Routledge’s Key Issues in Cultural Heritage. In 2018, she was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa for scientific merit, from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and in 2021 she was the recipient of the European Archaeology Association Heritage Prize. She is currently one of ten CNRS Fellow-ambassadors (2023-5).

Prior to arriving at the ANU in 2010, she held the position of Reader in heritage studies at the University of York, UK, where she directed the MA in Cultural Heritage Management for nine years. Originally from Sydney, she taught Indigenous Studies at the University of New South Wales (1995-2000), and heritage and archaeology at Charles Sturt University (1990-1995). She also worked as a heritage consultant in south-eastern Australia during the 1980s.

Her key books include Uses of Heritage (2006) and Emotional Heritage (2021) and the edited volumes Intangible Heritage (2009) and Safeguarding Intangible Heritage (2019) both with Natsuko Akagawa, Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present (2018) with Margaret Wetherell and Gary Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Class (2011) with Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell, and Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous engagements (2011) with Geoff Cubitt, Ross Wilson and Kalliopi Fouseki and the forthcomming (2024) The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics with Gönül Bozoglu, Gary Campbell and Christopher Whitehead.

B.A.(hons), PhD Sydney; GradDip. HEd. UNSW.

Key to Laurajane's interests is the understanding of heritage studies as an area of policy analysis and as a cultural process worthy of critical examination. Her work challenges the idea of heritage as primarily or simply an 'object' or 'site’ and re-theorises heritage as a cultural performance and practice of meaning and memory making. More particularly, her research interests include understanding the way heritage is used as a cultural tool in the process of remembering, forgetting and identity construction; the politics of heritage; the interplay between class and heritage; multiculturalism and heritage representation; community heritage; heritage tourism and heritage public policy and the cultural politics of identity.