Peter Jan Margry

Since 2013, Margry has been professor of European ethnology at the University of Amsterdam, within the department of Cultural Studies. His research program was laid out in his inaugural lecture of 2014. He focuses on past and contemporary religious cultures and new (“deviant”) religious movements, rituality, pilgrimage, memorialization, cultural memory, and (Intangible) cultural heritage and everyday life in general. The output of his research is listed online. During his history study he also pioneered in pilgrimage photography in the Netherlands in 1980-1981, of which a selection was chosen as part of the national online heritage collection "Memory of the Netherlands." Later, between 1993 and 1999, he executed a long term research project on Dutch pilgrimage culture, which resulted in a four volume book series and the BoL online research database. The 'logic' for that pilgrimage endeavor was recorded in a 2017 clip. In 2000-2001 he lived in Italy, researching the Holy Year and doing fieldwork on so called "deviant devotions."

As a follow-up to the pilgrimage project he initiated RAHRP, the Religious and Alternative Healing Research Platform in order to structure cultural and ethnological research on these 'alternative' practices. His current research involves also the politics of UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage convention (2003), in particular in relation to Dutch practices that caught international attention, as was the case for the Saint Nicholas tradition with his 'blackface' helper 'Zwarte Piet'.

After the killing of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 he acquired the letters and mementos posted at the various spontaneous or grassroots memorials in the Netherlands for the Meertens Institute and started to publish on them as well as on ritual practices related to mourning and protest after traumatic death.

Peter Jan Margry received an MA in medieval history from the University of Amsterdam in 1983. In 1985 he finished the post-doctoral study of Archivistics in The Hague. He received his PhD in cultural history from the University of Tilburg in 2000. From 2004-2015 he was executive vice-president/secretary of SIEF, the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore, during which time he was instrumental in the regeneration of this professional organization of now mainly European and North-American ethnologists/anthropologists and folklorists. From 2010-2013 he was also chair of SIEF’s Ethnology of Religion Working Group, and continued as a board member.  In 2011 he was professor of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven. He was visiting scholar/professor at the universities of California (Berkeley), Oregon (Eugene), Iceland, and Istanbul (Süleyman Sah).

Peter Jan Margry (born April 6, 1956) is a Dutch historian and European ethnologist who works at the University of Amsterdam and, since 1993, also at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences research center Meertens Institute in the Netherlands.  Previously, he worked in The Hague and Den Bosch where he held positions as archivist-researcher, historian and archival inspector successively at the Dutch National Archives, the Court of Audit (Netherlands) and the Province of North-Brabant. During the 1990s he was also active as a consultant on document heritage, working in Suriname and Papua (Indonesia).