Rate My Professor Laurajane Smith

Laurajane Smith is Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies and Head of the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. She earned her BA (Hons) and PhD from the University of Sydney, and a Graduate Diploma in Higher Education from the University of New South Wales. Originally from Sydney, her professional career commenced as a heritage consultant in south-eastern Australia during the 1980s. She taught heritage and archaeology at Charles Sturt University from 1990 to 1995 and Indigenous Studies at the University of New South Wales from 1995 to 2000. Prior to her appointment at ANU in 2010, Smith was Reader in Heritage Studies at the University of York, UK, where she directed the MA in Cultural Heritage Management for nine years.

Smith's academic interests center on heritage studies as an area of policy analysis and as a cultural process, re-theorising heritage as a cultural performance and practice of meaning and memory making rather than merely objects or sites. Her research explores heritage's role in remembering, forgetting, and identity construction; the politics of heritage; the interplay between class and heritage; multiculturalism and heritage representation; community heritage; heritage tourism; heritage public policy; and the cultural politics of identity. She founded the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, has served as editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies since 2009, and is co-general editor of Routledge’s Key Issues in Cultural Heritage series. Key publications include Uses of Heritage (2006), Emotional Heritage (2021), Heritage, Labour and the Working Class (2011, edited with Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell), Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present (2018, edited with Margaret Wetherell and Gary Campbell), and The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics (2024, co-edited with Gönül Bozoglu, Gary Campbell, and Christopher Whitehead). Among her honors are an ARC Future Fellowship, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Antwerp (2018), the European Archaeological Heritage Prize (2021), Fellowship of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA, 2016), and CNRS Fellow-Ambassador (2023–2025). Her long-term research includes interviewing over 4,500 visitors to 45 museums and heritage sites in England, Australia, and the United States.