Camilla Elisa Portesani is a Doctoral Researcher working on the PHACS Project (Public History as the new Citizen Science of the Past. She focuses on the role of participation and public history in museums.
Within the framework of her research, she envisions to focus on participatory practices inside the museumscape. Opening the world of museums and other cultural institutions to public participation brings to light the coexistence of different, and often conflicting, perspectives and interpretations of the past. She examines how the multiple and often competing public interpretations of the past can be treated, by whom, and how they can be embedded in the official historiography and in history production.
Within the scope of the PHACS project, a partnership and close collaboration with three museums has been established, namely with the M9 in Venice, Italy, the House of European History in Brussels, Belgium and the Lëtzebuerg City Museum in Luxembourg City. This should allow the research to target another important aspect concerning the impacts of this new shared authority on the institutions themselves but also on the public, the participants and on a broader dimension, on history and historiography, which she would also like to examine in the context of her doctoral research.
Camilla holds a joint Master’s Degree in EUROCULTURE Erasmus Mundus Master of Arts from the Strasbourg University, France and the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. She engaged in the conversation around inclusiveness and multifocality which characterizes history and historiography. Her Master’s Thesis focused on the analysis of museum representations of colonial past in the Netherlands. She studied a digitised extract of the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam presented on the themed tour of the official app dedicated to the Dutch colonial past and investigated on to what extent the decolonisation practiced were applied. Previously she completed a double Bachelor’s Degree at the University of Strasbourg in Foreign Languages and Cross-cultural studies and in History of Art.