Julia Noordegraaf conducts research into the ways in which people engage with cultural heritage, focusing particularly on how the context in which this heritage is preserved, displayed and seen affects how it is interpreted. In her first book, Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture (2004), she compared the history of museum presentation with the design of shops and department stores. In this way, she showed that the presentation of museum collections is strongly embedded in the broader visual culture to which it belongs. After this, Noordegraaf shifted her research to the preservation and presentation of audiovisual and digital heritage. She has published numerous articles in international journals including The Moving Image, Cinema & Cie and Critical Studies in Television, on topics such as the reuse of colonial films, amateur films and advertising films, museum and online presentation of television heritage and the use of crowdsourcing for access to digital heritage. Noordegraaf has also worked on an edited volume on the problem of preserving and exhibiting media art entitled Preserving and Exhibiting Art Media: Challenges and Perspectives, which will be published this autumn by Amsterdam University Press. In her current book project, Performing the Archive: Tracing Audiovisual Heritage in the Digital Age, Noordegraaf examines the consequences of digitization for preservation and access to audiovisual heritage on the status of the archive as knowledge keeper.

As Professor of Heritage and Digital Culture, Noordegraaf will focus on bringing together and promoting research about the reuse and meaning of digital heritage, as well as the impact of digitization on the perception and appreciation of cultural heritage. Her own future research will focus on digital source criticism (oriented towards search engines and heritage databases) and the preservation of digital art.

Noordegraaf has been working at the UvA since 2003, first as assistant professor and since 2011 as associate professor in the Department of Media Studies, where she was responsible, as programme director, for the international, professional Master’s degree Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image. In 2010, she was also Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar. Noordegraaf is Chair of the Publications Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and a member of the Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art Research. She is also editor of the Dutch Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis (Journal of Media History).