On November 5th, 2025, the Fondazione Professoressa Carla Barbati awarded Nicole Crescenzi for her PhD thesis “Exhibiting Human remains: an issue at the intersection of ethics, museology and law” defended at IMT Lucca on June 11th, 2025.
In her thesis Nicole explores the exhibition of human remains as a contested and controversial subject. She discusses different perspectives related to understanding the practice of exhibiting human remains in museums. The project collected information on the handling of human remains in museums and investigated the perspectives of both museums’ visitors and professionals through surveys and interviews, and compared the results obtained for different European countries. She also applied an ancient historical perspective to a debate that was so far mostly focused on modern and contemporary history. Doing this also meant that, in the line of Ethicakl Entanglements, all human remains, including the archaeological ones, that scholars had, up until now, left on the side, with very few exceptions were included in the discussion. The thesis includes a synthetic catalogue of regulations museums and states adopt in exhibiting human remains, a first catalogue of European museums hosting human remains in their collections, and a broad investigation of museums visitors, covering European and non-European countries. The thesis will be published by Oxbow.
The Fondazione Professoressa Carla Barbati is a non-profit organisation established to honour the memory and continue the work of Professor Carla Barbati, an eminent scholar of cultural heritage. Its mission is to promote the study of cultural heritage in all its tangible and intangible forms, from an interdisciplinary perspective rather than an exclusively legal one. The Foundation awarded prizes for theses that explore the theme of cultural heritage in all its tangible and intangible forms, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Liv Nilsson Stutz who acted as co-advisor to the thesis together with Professor Marialuisa Catoni is incredibly proud of Nicole for receiving this distinguished award for her work, as is the whole The Ethical Entanglements team
Ethical Entanglements 