Eleonora Grammatikou

Email: elgram@uni-bonn.de

I am a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Global Heritage Lab, working at the intersection of critical museum and heritage studies, cultural anthropology, and postcolonial and queer theory. My current research examines the Tucher family coat of arms as a case study to investigate the historical representation of People of Color in European art and material culture. Adopting a transdisciplinary multi-method approach, the project combines cultural-historical analysis with heraldic and iconographic methods, as well as empirical workshop-based research. Situated within this diachronic framework, the project traces the shifting meanings, functions, and interpretations of the coat of arms over time, while engaging with contemporary debates on critical heritage, representation, and the politics of visual culture.

More broadly, my work is concerned with how material culture – such as objects, collections, and displays – as well as the institutional frameworks in which they are embedded, produce and stabilize social hierarchies while simultaneously offering the potential to challenge them. I am particularly interested in the ways museums and heritage institutions negotiate questions of representation, memory, and inclusion, and how marginalized perspectives can be made visible within these spaces.

As a queer cultural anthropologist engaged in both research and museum practice, my work focuses on postcolonial and critical heritage studies, as well as queer and gender studies. In my previous work, I examined the challenges and potentials of integrating queer perspectives into museum practice, using the Theatermuseum Düsseldorf as an empirical case study. This research engaged with diversity-sensitive practices and narratives, drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from museum studies, queer theory, and critical cultural analysis to address ongoing debates around the “crisis of representation” in museums.

By combining theoretical inquiry with close analysis of cultural artifacts and institutional practices, my work seeks to rethink dominant narratives and contribute to more inclusive and critically engaged approaches to heritage and museum work.

Publications
Grammatikou, Eleonora (2026): Das queere Museum – Praktiken und Narrationen diversitätssensibler Museumsarbeit. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, approx. 170 pages. ISBN: 978-3-8376-8132-1.