Laura Demeter

Dr. Laura Demeter is a researcher at the Centre for Heritage Conservation Studies and Technologies (KDWT) at the Otto Friedrich University Bamberg, as part of the interdisciplinary research consortium UrbanMetaMapping (Mapping and Transforming: An interdisciplinary analysis of city maps as a visual medium of urban transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, 1939–1949). Laura studied History, Art History and Romance languages (Italian) at the University of Bucharest and Ruhr University in Bochum, before joining the international UNESCO Master Program in World Heritage Studies at the Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus. She explored issues such as: heritage-making processes, value creation and transitional heritage in the context of authoritarian regimes and regime changes in her dissertation ‘Picking up the Pieces from the Communist Past: Transitional Heritage after 1989 in Germany and Romania’, at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy (2017).

Laura has an established record of international publications and fellowships, including the postdoctoral position at the Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture in Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig (2019- 2020). She was part of various international research projects, such as the Horizon 2020 EU Project Reflective Societies: ‘COURAGE. Cultural Opposition: Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the former Socialist Countries’, as a research associate at Leibniz Institute for East- and Southeast European Studies, in Regensburg (2017-2019). As postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bucharest her research focused on human-rights issues and practices of heritage-making and destruction in (post-) socialist settings, such as communist Romania. Laura’s teaching experience together with the University of Bologna focused on issues related to international comparative legislation in heritage protection and international organizations.

For the interdisciplinary research consortium UrbanMetaMapping Laura’s objective is to analyse the impact of the Second World War on the urban space in Romania and Republic of Moldova and the role of heritage preservation in the context of transformation processes.