Weaponised Pasts is an interdisciplinary project, drawing from expertise in archaeology, heritage studies, cultural evolution and psychology.
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. He is the Director of the Cognition Computation and Development Lab.
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 primary investigator 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.
