Dr. Laurie Kalb Cosmo is currently a university lecturer at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and a member of the research group in Museums, Collections and Society. She has been a member of the faculty at Temple University Rome since 2008. Before moving to Europe, Dr. Cosmo was a curator and museum administrator at Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, Autry Museum of the American West, Peabody Essex Museum and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She has been a Research Associate at Peabody Museum of Harvard University, the recipient of a Smithsonian Institution doctoral fellowship, Fulbright Professional Award in Kuala Lumpur, and resident fellowships at School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe and Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbertide, Italy. Her interests are museum history and theory, cultural heritage preservation, politics and art, applied arts, craft, and vernacular traditions, and Italian fine art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is a past board member of the International Council of Museum’s International Committee for Museums of Ethnography (ICME) and a research affiliate of the Centre for Global Heritage and Development in Leiden, NL.