Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Other Affiliations: Bergamo, Lingue E Letterature Straniere
Leeds Metropolitan University, Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change
Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Social, Political and Communication Sciences

Faculty of Social Sciences

About

I obtained my PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and am currently a Senior Researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven (Belgium). In addition, I am a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University (UK) and Visiting Professor at the Università degli studi di Bergamo (Italy). From 2011 until 2013 I serve as Executive Committee member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
    My research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, heritage, cultural brokering and cosmopolitanism. I have published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and newspaper articles on these topics in the USA, the UK, India, Indonesia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Colombia.
    I am the author of Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond (2010, Oxford: Berghahn), a book analyzing the circulation and dynamics of tourism imaginaries. My current research project focuses on the complex (dis)connections between tourism imaginaries and ideas of transcultural migration (with ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia, Tanzania, Chile, and Belgium). In this context, I founded CuMoRe (Cultural Mobilities Research) and the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network.
    I am on the editorial boards of Social Anthropology, Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation, AIBR - Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, and Mondes du Tourisme. In addition, I am on UNESCO’s and UNWTO’s roster of consultants, and I am an expert member of the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Committee and the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network 'Culture, Tourism and Development', and an expert panel member of the National Geographic Society’s Center for Sustainable Destinations.

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