Sarah Van Beurden (BA, MA KULeuven, PhD University of Pennsylvania) is an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University (USA) and a visiting scholar in the Department of African Studies at Ghent University. A historian of colonial and postcolonial central Africa, she is interested in the ways culture is constructed, represented, and used in political contexts. She has published on the history of museums, art restitution, decolonization, heritage and conservation politics, and the history of art history and anthropology. Her recent book, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Ohio University Press, 2015) investigates the role of museum politics in the legitimation of the Belgian colonial regime, as well as the postcolonial Mobutu regime. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities. Van Beurden has held fellowships at the University of Texas in Austin, the University of Duisburg-Essen, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.