People

Dr Chiara Bonacchi, (BA, MA, PhD, FSA, FSA Scot, FHEA)

Chancellor's Fellow in Heritage, Text and Data Mining and Senior Lecturer in Heritage in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh

Dr Bonacchi is the Principal Investigator for Weaponised Pasts. She is an internationally active researcher in digital heritage and the politics of the past, and uses small- and big- data-driven approaches to study contemporary heritage experiences and values. She is the author of Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (UCL Press), and has led/co-led a dozen collaborative research grants funded by UKRI, the Leverhulme Trust, the European Commission and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022, she received the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Archaeology for undertaking large-scale and comparative studies of the relationships between people’s interactions with the past, their political identities and future thinking.

Dr Bonacchi has advised research and heritage bodies in the UK and overseas, such as Historic England and Historic Environment Scotland, and her work has featured in national newspapers including The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. She is the Director of the Heritage Minds Lab.

Dr Zachary Horne

Lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh

Dr Horne is Co-Investigator for Weaponised Pasts. He is a researcher in Cognitive Psychology, and his work sits at the intersection of psychology and the philosophy of science. He is an expert on attitude change and intuitive reasoning processes, and studies these and other social cognition phenomena using cutting-edge statistical and machine learning methods and big data extracted from social media and other sources.

He held the prestigious National Research Council Fellowship and has published in leading journals including PNAS, PLoS One, Psychological Science and Cognition.

Dr Alberto Acerbi

Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento

Dr Acerbi is Co-Investigator for Weaponised Pasts. He is a researcher in the field of cultural evolution whose work sits at the interface of psychology, anthropology and sociology. His work focuses on contemporary cultural phenomena, which he investigates using individual-based models and quantitative analysis of large-scale cultural data.

He is the author of Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age and Individual-based Models of Cultural Evolution. A step-by-step guide using R and has published in high-profile journals such as PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, and Philosophical Transactions B. He is a core member of the Center for Computational Social Science and Human Dynamics (C2S2).

Dr John-Paul Martindale

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh

Dr Martindale is a post-doctoral researcher for Weaponised Pasts. He finished his PhD in 2024 while working as a Lecturer in Differential Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. During his PhD, he developed a new psychometric measure of the cluster of antagonistic personality traits known as the Dark Triad. This measure, called the Faceted Dark Triad Scale, was recently accepted for publication at Assessment.

Dr Martindale will contribute expert knowledge of personality psychology and work on mining and analysing language data from social media and newspaper articles, using Bayesian statistics and cultural evolution modelling to assess the factors that influence the spread of heritage-based hostility.

Dr Emily Neu Line

Post-doctoral researcher

Dr Line is a post-doctoral researcher for Weaponised Pasts. She received her PhD in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2026. Her research uses mathematical and computational modelling to study how people integrate information into their judgements and decisions, with a particular focus on misinformation and unreliable information. She has applied these approaches across a range of contexts, including health, economics, and psychology and law.

Dr Line will contribute expertise in experimental design, decision-making, and computational modelling to assess how heritage-based hostility messages evolve through repeated social transmission.

Leverhulme Trust

Weaponised Pasts is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (ref. RPG-2024-371), an independent charity that seeks to fund blue skies research with the potential to directly benefit society. This work would not be possible without their generosity and support.

Edinburgh Futures Institute

Edinburgh Futures Institute is a new futures-focused space for learning, research, and innovation at the University of Edinburgh. It prioritises innovative, interdisciplinary research aimed at tackling some of society's most complex and important issues.

Heritage Minds Lab

The Heritage Minds lab is a dynamic, trans-disciplinary and cross-sector ecosystem that develops new, data-rich approaches to heritage research and practice. The Heritage Minds lab informs real-world interventions with social purpose. It is based in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, and is supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

Cognition, Computation and Development Lab

The Cognition, Computation and Development lab is based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. It studies explanatory reasoning and scientific explanation, analogical reasoning and arguments by analogy, attitude change outside the lab, and relational reasoning in adults and children.