Lise Puyo is an anthropologist specialized in the relationships between people and objects. She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in a joined degree agreement with l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2022. Her work focuses on material supports of historical memory, cultural heritage, and the negotiations between stakeholders to interpret, access, possess, and display this heritage. She was a research assistant on the Wampum Trail project at the University of Pennsylvania, where she travelled between museums, archives, and Indigenous communities to investigate the provenance and histories of wampum belts, significant objects of cultural patrimony held in museums across North America and Europe. She conducted her own research on wampum in archives, museums, and catholic sanctuaries in the United States, Canada, France, Belgium and Italy. She has received research grants from a number of institutions, including the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, l’Ecole Française de Rome, and the Penn Museum. She joined Cast in Stone as a postdoctoral research fellow in September 2022. She is drafting the biographies of contested statues in France that currently stand at the center of clashing narratives about the past and clashing imaginations of the future.
