Romania
Travelling Cultural Heritage
Circulation and Digital Afterlives
Call for Papers
Cultural Heritage Lab International Conference
4th edition
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
December 10-11, 2026
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, as part of the FORTHEM Alliance, invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners to submit proposals for the 4th edition of the Cultural Heritage Lab International Conference, dedicated to exploring cultural heritage as a dynamic process of circulation across cultural, geographical, institutional, and historical boundaries.
The 2026 edition focuses on Travelling Cultural Heritage (TCH): an approach that understands heritage not as a fixed repository, but as a process through which cultural forms, practices, ideas, and meanings move, encounter different contexts, and are transformed along the way. Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of “travelling theory”, Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts”, and scholarship on cultural circulation, TCH shifts attention from mobile objects to the processes through which heritage is transmitted, adapted, appropriated, reinterpreted, and re-signified.
Heritage travels through migration, exchange, conquest, education, trade, tourism, collecting, translation, transmedial transfer, and institutional networks. Migrants adapt cultural practices acquired abroad to their home contexts; travelling elites import fashions, recipes, and other cultural products; artistic styles acquire regional forms as they circulate; and networks of institutions, scholars, dealers, and historical circumstances determine how artefacts enter major collections. Such movements involve adaptation and transformation, but also appropriation, exclusion, and unequal centre–periphery relations.
Circulation may allow heritage to acquire new meanings, but it may also entail loss. The large-scale purchase, digitisation, and destruction of books for AI training suggests a future in which physical heritage disappears while its digital avatars survive—an extreme form of travel across media and material states, combining virtual preservation with material destruction. More optimistically, AI, data science, interoperable infrastructures, and spatial visualisation can trace cultural circulation, compare contexts, and recover seemingly lost artefacts, including previously unreadable ancient manuscripts.
We welcome contributions that engage with Travelling Cultural Heritage from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including cultural and heritage studies, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, history, linguistics and literary studies, political science, art history, architecture, digital humanities, economics, media studies, religious studies, drama, film, the performing arts, museum studies, memory studies, and food studies.
Contributors are invited to submit abstracts on, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Travelling Cultural Heritage: theories, concepts, and methodologies;
- Cultural circulation, transmission, adaptation, and re-signification;
- Heritage: migration, displacement, and diaspora;
- Museums, collections, objects, routes, networks, intermediaries, and infrastructures of cultural circulation;
- The movement of architectural forms, artistic practices, rituals, and cultural traditions;
- Colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial circulations of cultural heritage;
- Digital heritage, digital infrastructures, AI, platforms and computational approaches to cultural circulation;
- Heritage in translation: what changes when cultural forms travel between languages and the production of new heritage meanings
- Local content, foreign forms: adaptation and naturalisation across literatures;
- World Cultural Heritage: comparative approaches to heritage beyond national frameworks;
- Archaeological evidence for mobility, exchange, and cultural contacts;
- Memory and heritage: overlappings and differences;
- Case studies of cultural forms, practices, objects, ideas, or meanings that have travelled across contexts.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words, along with a short biographical note (max. 100 words), to Ovio Olaru (ovio.olaru@ulbsibiu.ro) and Daniela Stanciu-Păscărița (daniela.stanciu@ulbsibiu.ro) by November 1, 2026.
The organisers’ decision regarding submissions will be communicated by November 15.
For effectiveness, please include “Cultural Heritage Lab conference submission” in the subject line of your email.
The conference will be held in English, German, and French, and will take place exclusively on-site.
We look forward to your contributions!
Kind regards,
The organisers
Contact Information
Junior Lecturer Ovio Olaru // ovio.olaru@ulbsibiu.ro
Junior Lecturer Daniela Stanciu // daniela.stanciu@ulbsibiu.ro
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
Contact Email
ovio.olaru@ulbsibiu.ro
URL: https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/elabchrom/cultural-heritage-lab/
