Rob van der Laarse is emeritus professor Heritage and Memory of War and Conflict at the humanities faculties of VU Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam (Westerbork Chair), where he was a staff member of the History and Art and Culture departments. He was also founding director of Heritage Studies at the UvA and of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM). He graduated in history and obtained a PhD in humanities at the UvA (both with greatest distinction).

Research fields

Rob's research focuses roughly on the fields of Power, Culture and Elites, and Heritage, Memory and Conflict. He published around 150 book, article and webpublications and has been invited approximately to some 200 lectures and keynote talks. He also co-organized a substantial number of international conferences such as The Challenge of Heritage (Amsterdam 2002), The Dynamics of War, Heritage, Memory and Remembrance (Amsterdam 2007), The Archaeology of Terrorscapes (Helsinki 2012), Competing Memories (Amsterdam 2013), and Heritage, Tourism and Hospitality (Amsterdam 2015). 

Power, Landscape and Elite Culture 

Since his historical-anthropological PhD dissertation on class, religion and power in a local Dutch urban community, honored with a Premium Erasmianum Prize (1990) an important part of Rob's research is born from a fascination with (early) modern elite transformations and networks, and the interpretation and (re)presentation of culture. He became fascinated by topics like the long-term cultural and territorial representation of landed power, and for many years explored with students and colleagues in archives and fieldtrips the remnants of castles and country estates. This resulted in many publications on the long understudied nobility of the Dutch Republic, the Amsterdam merchant elite, 16-17th c. territorial politics of the Habsburg and Orange Courts, and 19th Brussels-Hague court architecture. He currently co-authores a large synthesis of early-modern elite cultures in the Low Countries, and co-supervises several PhD projects in this field.    

Purity, Heritage, Conflict and Memory

His other research interest concerns Europe's (post-) Enlightenment trajectory of 20th c. racism, purity, health and order in art, culture and politics, Challenged by the EU's rising 'identity crisis' he published widely on the complexities of memory and modernity, heritage, identity and conflict, in partiular the issue of European competing memories, Holocaust dissonances and abuses of the past. He pointed at strongly tabood attractions like perpetrator heritage, and critically commented the geopolitical dimension of Europe's culture battles like the Holocaust, postcommunist, and postcolonial memory conflicts in the EU's borderlands. Most recently he co-edited the 2023 HMC journal issue Accessing Campscapes and the 2025 a government advisory report on the future of the Hague Yugoslavia Tribunal as Monument of Justice (Amsterdam University Press 2025).

Academic impact  

During his career Van der Laarse has been granted more than 5 million euros research funding, supervised/s more than 20 PhD projects at different universities, and was honored with a Praemium Erasmianum Research Prize 1990 and with a Euromediterranea Prize 2013. 

Since the early 2000's he pioneered in heritage studies' research funding, which culminated in several large (inter) national research projects, and with Frank van Vree  initiated the NWO research line Dynamics of Memory (2008-2014) at the UvA, VU and NIOD, co-funded by the Ministry of VWS, leading to a large number of dissertations and book volumes by means of co-matching with Holocaust memorial museums and war heritage institutes. Van der Laarse further received an Anglo-Dutch (AHRC-NWO) grant on Landscapes of War and Trauma (with the University of Cambridge), and a NWO grant for his Terrorscapes in Postwar Europe project on transnational memory of totalitarian terror and genocide in postwar Europe from the Holocaust to the 1990s Yugoslav Wars, with an additional fellowship and theme group grant (with Georgi Verbeeck) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). This network was awarded the Premio Euromediterrenea of the Italian Ministry of Culture, Confindustria, and the public media association in Rome 2013 in the category of best practice of transnational communication beyond the national cultural boundaries "that will have a fundamental impact on the building of European citizenship".

Drawing from this expertise on conflict sites and competing memories analysis, he was granted 1,2 million euros from the European HERA-JRP/ ERA-Horizon 2020 Uses of the Past call of 2016 for the collaborative 4-years project Accessing Campscapes (iC-ACCESS) with a large international team of academic and professional partners and IT companies, working together in around 15 organised research fieldtrips on interdisciplinary experimenting with multivocal, inclusive strategies for digital access to European conflicted heritage sites, and at the same time also UvA lead in the Horizon 2020 5-years Marie-Curie ITN project Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe (CHEurope) of which the Amsterdam team participates with several PhD students in an international doctoral training programme with European key partners in critical heritage studies.   

Editing, Reviewing and Evaluating

He is a book and peer reviewer of several international journals, founding co-editor with of the Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict (Palgrave-Macmillan), Heritage and Memory Studies (Amsterdam University Press), and previously of Landscape and Heritage Studies (AUP), as well as a editorial board member of Virtus. Journal of Nobility Studies (Verloren) and from 2016-2019 Accessing Campscapes E-Journal (with Zuzanna Dziuban) and co-founding editor of Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal  (HMS) launched in 2021, and also a regular research evaluator and panel assessor for NWO, RCN, HERA, JPICH and ERC for the past six years.

Public activities

Rob is a trustee of Bas Vroege's Paradox Foundation (photography and new media productions), advisor/consultant for ministries, museums and heritage institutes. From 2009-2024 I have also been academic advisor of Memorial Centre Camp Westerbork and co-initated with Jan Kolen and Dirk Mulder the Westerbork Archaeological Research Project together with CLUE-VU and RAAP Archaoelogy as part of a European Holocaust archaeology collaboration, with much spin-off in media and cultural initiatives, such as the AVRO radio 1 serial Dadererfgoed (perpetrator's heritage, 2008) and the Flanders urban curating initiative Museumtraject Mechelen (2013). Together with archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls and Ivar Schute he took part in the Furneaux and Edgar productions Unearthing Treblinka (Channel 5, 2013) and Treblinkla: Hitler's Killing Machine (Smithsonnian TV, 2014) on the discovery of the Treblinka gas chambers, and he is also regularly asked for international and national media expert interviews. His Inaugural speech as a holder of the Westerbork Chair focused on the contested future of the Auschwitz as Europe's main post-War memory paradigm, and his 2024 Farewell Speech (NL / ENG)  with Ukraine and Gaza as signs of a new paradigm of Europe in War.