The commission runs a seminar series where researchers present their ongoing research or general research perspectives.
Calendar
- 30 April 2025. Maddalena Cataldi, Building Humanity’s Heritage. Science, Politics and Religion (1860-1970).
Cataldi, Building Humanity’s Heritage. Science, Politics and Religion (1860-1970)

My research program focuses on the social and political history of the construction of humanity’s heritage between the mid-19th century and the 1970s. Indeed, long before World Heritage was defined as “the common heritage of mankind”, to be protected by UNESCO, a group of actors shaped the intellectual space and scientific imaginary that have formed our conceptions of the unity of the human family. From the mid-19th century onward, men and women, clerics and laymen alike, have been building up collections of objects such as fossil bone fragments, lithic tools, skeletons representative of the world’s populations and rock art records. This cultural and scientific heritage includes objects that prove both the biological unity and cultural diversity of humankind. It proves our own evolutionary trajectory, that of Homo sapiens. The aim is to grasp the establishment of the paradigm of human evolution with which we are familiar today, that of Homo sapiens, which, from the 1950s onward, includes all the current populations of the globe, their cultures and the objects associated with them in a single origin.