Title: Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultural Heritage Studies
Affiliation: Institute for Digital Cultural Heritage Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München
Nicola Lercari is a Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultural Heritage Studies at the LMU Munich. He received his Ph.D. in History and Computing from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2011 and has participated in numerous digital heritage and digital archaeology research initiatives in Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Turkey.
In 2021, Prof. Lercari was tenured at the University of California, Merced. From there, in 2022, he moved to the LMU Munich (University of Munich) to establish the new Institute for Digital Cultural Heritage Studies. His scholarship exposes the fundamental role that digital and geospatial technologies play in the investigation and protection of sites of cultural significance, archaeological excavation/museum collections, data, and information that describe and document the cultural diversity of our planet.
Lercari's publications cover time and space from the ancient cities of Bologna (900 BCE-present, Italy), Çatalhöyük (7100-5600 BCE, Turkey), Palenque (400 BCE-800 CE, Mexico) and Heloros (8th – 2nd century BCE) to the historic sites of Bodie and Fort Ross, in California. In 2011-2017, Prof. Lercari conducted archaeological research at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey, innovating remote sensing techniques and digital archaeology methods applied to the investigation, interpretation, and dissemination of this important Neolithic site. In 2022, he started his first large-scale research project at LMU Munich and began a partnership with the University of South Florida’s Institute for Digital Exploration to survey and map the Greek fortified city of Heloros in Southeast Sicily to generate new understandings and interpretations of the site and its cultural landscape.
His new book Preserving Cultural Heritage in a Digital Age: Sending Out an S.O.S. reveals the frequently silent loss of archaeological and historic sites occurring worldwide and related intangible heritage and collections, data, information, and knowledge.
