Journal
Warburg Professorship 2026
Sharon Macdonald, Berlin
The Aby Warburg Foundation and the Warburg House are delighted to announce that Sharon Macdonald, a social anthropologist who teaches and researches at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she also heads the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg | Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, will be the Foundation’s 2026 Warburg Professor. She will be living and working in Hamburg from mid-October to Mid-December 2026.
Sharon Macdonald is a social anthropologist who works with and across various disciplines, as well as beyond them – with artists, museums and others. Trained at the University of Oxford, she held several full professorial positions in the UK before coming to the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2015 as an Alexander von Humboldt Professor. Internationally known for her wide-ranging research – especially on the politics and practices of heritage, memory and museums –her work has appeared in more than ten languages. A Professor in the Institute of European Ethnologie, she is also Director of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik and Founding Co-Director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg | Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, all at Humboldt-Universität. In addition, she was recently Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, is an Honorary Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, a Research Associate of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and sits on various Boards, including the Academic Committee of the House of European History, of which she is Vice-Chair. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of History, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a Member of Academia Europaea.
She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, most recently the volume Artistic Provenance Research (2025), co-edited with Tal Adler, and her book Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage: A Berlin Ethnography (2023).
Lecture
Tuesday, November 17, 2026, 7 pm
(Foto: P. Plum)