Scientific Team

The Académie des Traces was born out of a dialogue between researchers and professionals working in the fields of museums, heritage and heritage education. The scientific team is made up of the members listed below. For its 2024 edition, Julie Sissia and Margareta von Oswald were responsible for the scientific programme; Margareta von Oswald oversees the 2025 edition.

Margareta von Oswald is a socio-cultural anthropologist (Phd, EHESS Paris/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and curator, currently a researcher at inherit. heritage in transformation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research is concerned with museums and difficult heritage, asking how museums can be truly democratic places that effect change. In her monograph Working Through Colonial Collections. An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, she discusses the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism and its legacies in ethnological museums. Other recent, open-access publications include the books The Resonant Museum. Berlin Conversations on Mental Health (ed. with Diana Mammana, Verlag der Buchhandlung Franz und Walther König, 2023), Awkward Archives. Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (ed. with Jonas Tinius Archive Books, 2022) and Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (ed. with Jonas Tinius, Leuven University Press, 2020).

Julie Sissia is scientific project manager for the Franco-German research fund on the provenance of cultural goods from sub-Saharan Africa at the Marc Bloch Centre, where she works as an international technical expert (ETI) deployed by Expertise France for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Europe (MEAE). In 2022 and 2023, she was ETI project leader for the structuring of museum cooperation with the Deutscher Museumsbund, where she designed and organised the meeting of museum professionals on “collections from colonial contexts”.
A PhD in art history from Sciences Po Paris (2015), her thesis, defended under Franco-German co-direction (Sciences Po-Kunstakademie Düsseldorf), focused on the reception of art from the GDR and the FRG in France between 1959 and 1989.
It coordinated the joint Franco-German call for projects in the humanities and social sciences ANR-DFG (2020-2022) and organised the 15-year anniversary conference of this programme in June 2022, bringing together more than 90 speakers and opening with a lecture by Bénédicte Savoy. She has been the recipient of postdoctoral fellowships from the Women in Research (WiRe) programme at the University of Münster (2020), the Sigmar Polke Foundation (2019), assistant curator of the Hans Hartung retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2018) and research fellow in the ERC ‘Ownreality’ project at the German Centre for Art History (2011-2015). She has taught at Sciences Po, the Ecole du Louvre and the University of Fribourg (CH).

Felicity Bodenstein is an art historian specialising in the history of museums and collections. Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at Sorbonne University in the history of contemporary art and heritage. She defended her thesis in 2015 at the University of Paris-Sorbonne on the history of the Cabinet des médailles et antiques de la Bibliothèque nationale (1819-1924). Since 2015, thanks to scholarships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and the Technische Universität in Berlin in the “Translocations” group, directed by Bénédicte Savoy, she has been working on the case of war booty taken from Benin City (now in Nigeria) in 1897 and the history of the dispersal of the objects. Since 2020, she has been co-director of the  Digital Benin project, based at the Museum am Rothenbaum. Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK). For the first time, this project brings together data from 131 institutions in more than 20 countries, making it possible to record over 5,000 Benin City artefacts and link them with knowledge co-constructed between Nigerian and European researchers. Recent publications include: Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu and Eva-Maria Troelenberg, 2022. Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return, Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books; Felicity Bodenstein (ed), 2020. “Africa: Trade, Traffic, Collections,” Journal for Art Market Studies, volume 4, number 1, at https://fokum-jams.org/index.php/jams/article/view/119.

Mathieu Fribault has a doctorate in social anthropology and ethnology from EHESS (Paris). His work focuses on the history and ethnography of the Baga and the Susu, comparing these societies and the territories in which they emerged from the slave trade, one shaped around a project of refuge and marronage, the other closely involved in international trade. In particular, he has carried out extensive fieldwork among the Baga Sitemu of Guinea. He is also involved in the application of anthropology, working for the IRD on micro-ethnographic studies as part of the Ebola epidemic, and on mining territories that are having an impact on populations in Guinea. He has lectured for several years in engineering schools and at the University of Paris 8 in the anthropology department. For the past year, Mathieu Fribault has been working at the Ecole du Patrimoine Africain as part of the French cooperation programme, helping to build the school’s capacity: revising training curricula, creating a master’s degree, opening up new partnerships. As an anthropologist, he gives courses on intangible heritage, ethnology and the anthropology of objects and techniques, and the practice of social science research, as well as more occasional lectures on social museography and provenance research. At the heart of these activities are the issues surrounding museology and museum projects in Benin.

Franck Ogou is a cultural heritage manager specialising in African heritage. He holds a PhD in Heritage and Archaeology and has been working for some fifteen years at the Ecole du Patrimoine Africain, which he has been managing since January 2019. The Ecole du Patrimoine Africain-EPA is an international university specialising in the conservation and mediation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. It primarily covers the 26 French-, Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries and sub-Saharan Africa, and more broadly offers its expertise to any African country that so wishes through training and capacity-building programmes and the implementation of cultural projects. In this capacity, he has directed several training programmes and coordinated projects to preserve and promote African cultural heritage. He has been a very active member of the committees set up by Benin for restitution.

Damiana Oţoiu is an anthropologist of politics and law, with a PhD in social and political sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2010). She is currently a lecturer in political anthropology at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Bucharest. She has taught at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Marseille and Paris, and the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, among others. Her research focuses on how the ownership of museum collections is (re)defined and contested in postcolonial contexts. She conducts anthropological research in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, France and Belgium. Her research has been funded through European grants (e.g. Marie Curie International Fellowship for Experienced Researchers), fellowships offered by institutes of advanced study (e.g. New Europe College, Bucharest or Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna), or visiting fellowships (e.g. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle; LSE, London; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC; IFAS Research, Johannesburg). Damiana has coordinated several research projects, including Museums and Controversial Collections. Politics and Policies of Heritage-Making in Post-colonial and Post-socialist Contexts (2015-17) and Decolonial Practices in Museum Collections (Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa): Local Histories and Global Circulations (2021-22). Recent publications include: Damiana Oţoiu, “What is our role? Will we be able to work on equal terms?”. Collaboration and controversies over the renovation of AfricaMuseum (Tervuren), in International Journal of Heritage Studies, 31: 3/2025, pp. 358-372; Damiana Oţoiu, “Restitution, rapatriement, transfert des collections muséales. Enjeux historico-politiques, juridiques et épistémiques des collections muséales. Enjeux historico-politiques, juridiques et épistémiques”, in Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, Anna Seiderer et Margareta von Oswald (dir.), Traces du dé/colonial au musée, Horizons d’attente, Paris, 2024, pp. 39 – 65; Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu et Eva-Maria Troelenberg (eds.), Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return, Oxford, New York, Berghahn Books, 2022.

Franck L Wendyam Pacere is a heritage curator and doctoral student at the Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis in Senegal. He is interested in heritage interpretation as a tool and method for territorial development at World Heritage sites. Originally from Burkina Faso, he is in charge of continuing education and teaches at the Ecole du Patrimoine Africain and is a member of the prefiguration committees for the major national museums under construction in Benin at the Agence Nationale des Patrimoine Touristiques (ANPT). He is a lecturer in the Heritage Professions section of the UFR CRAC at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis and at the École nationale d’administration et de magistrature in Ouagadougou-ENAM. Lastly, he is a national expert responsible for implementing the process of repatriating Burkinabe cultural property.

Anna Seiderer is a lecturer in the art department at the University of Paris 8/Vincennes, Saint-Denis, a researcher at the Arts des Images et art contemporain [AIAC/EPHA] laboratory, associated with the Laboratoire d’anthropologie des mondes contemporains [LAMC] and a member of the editorial board of the journal Esclavages & Post~esclavages. Her thesis in aesthetics, supported by the philosophy department of the University of Paris X-Nanterre, the Ecole Africaine du Patrimoine (EPA) and the Centre Africain des Hautes Etudes (CAHE), focuses on the concept of transmission at work in post-colonial museums in Benin. She has worked as a research assistant at the Africa Museum, coordinating the European project Ethnography museums and world cultures [RIME] and supporting artistic research in the museum’s colonial archives. She is co-curator (with Anne-Marie Bouttiaux) of the travelling exhibition Fetish modernity (2011), co-editor of the eponymous exhibition catalogue and of the book Une critique postcoloniale en acte. Les musées d’ethnographie contemporains sous le prisme des études postcoloniales (2014). Since 2015, she has been working on processes of rewriting the colonial past from the field of contemporary creation.

As part of the research project Images animées, mémoires controversées [CINEMAF], she has developed, in collaboration with Didier Houénoudé (Abomey Calavi University) and Bronwyn Lace (Center For The Less Good Idea), the artistic research on colonial archive collections. Recent publications include:Traces du dé/colonial au musée, Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, Anna Seiderer et Margareta von Oswald (dir.), Horizons d’attente, Paris, 2024, ‘Images fantômes. Colonial Anamnesis”, in Alessandro Gori, Fabio Viti, eds, Africa in the World, the World in Africa / L’Africa nel mondo, il mondo in Africa, Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2022, pp. 217-235; “Aida. Prélude d’une conquête impériale”, Aida by Giuseppe Verdi, staging by Lotte de Beer, Programme de l’Opéra de Paris, Saison 2020/2021, pp. 49-53; Interview on Borderlands with Jo Ractliffe in A toi appartient le regard et (…) La liaison infinie entre les choses, Christine Barthe (ed.), Musée du quai Branly/Actes Sud, pp.38-45; “Animating collapse. Reframing colonial film archives”, with Alexander Schellow, in Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial, by Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 187-209; “Reflexivity at Work. Performativité du ” musée palais royal ” d’Abomey”, in “Museums and religious heritage: Post-colonialist and post-socialist perspectives”, Civilisations, vol.71, pp. 85-111; “Recaptioning Congo. African stories and colonial pictures”, interview with Sandrine Colard, L’Art Même (89), pp.68-70.

Honoré Tchatchouang Ngoupeyou holds a PhD in Economic and Social History from the University of Dschang (2021), and a PhD in Heritage from CY Cergy Paris Université (2022). He also holds an international diploma in heritage conservation from the Institut National du Patrimoine-INP in Paris (2019). He specialises in conservation in African contexts and explores management and preservation approaches that bring together community knowledge and institutional management standards. Between 2008 and 2019, he was involved in La Route des Chefferies in Cameroon. He has worked with a number of museums and training institutions in Africa (Musée Théodore-Monod d’art africain and Musée des Civilisations noires in Dakar, Musée national du Gabon, Musée national Barthélemy Boganda in Bangui), Austria (University of Vienna as part of the Global Conservation: Histories and Theories programme) and France (Institut National du Patrimoine, Musée des Confluences, Musée du quai Branly Jacques-Chirac, Office de coopération et d’information muséales). He is a member of the scientific committee of the renovation project of the Musée de la Musique in Paris, and is currently working as an expert on the Beninese government’s flagship projects to promote heritage and tourism development. As such, he makes a professional and scientific contribution to the prefiguration committees of the major national museums currently under construction, in preparation for the commissioning of future facilities. He is also involved in the institutional discussions led by the Ecole du Patrimoine Africain (EPA) and the INP to pool their respective training methods in order to exchange engineering strategies and educational offerings. He is the author of a number of scientific articles and recently coordinated the dossier “Objets et patrimoines des Grassfields : au-delà de la matière… en quête de chair” in the journal Trouble dans les collections (No. 5, 2023).