Markers of Authenticity

Why does authenticity matter? How do we confidently access and understand the past, and integrate it into our present? Why and how can we trust what we know about the past or even the present? That which is fake, forged, and ‘inauthentic’ can provide a wealth of knowledge about what humans believe is important and worthy of reproduction.

Markers of Authenticity is a research stream within the Faculty of Arts that aims to explore the importance of authenticity in the human experience. We achieve this through collaborative and interdisciplinary engagement with a broad range of issues that try to answer the key question: why does authenticity matter?

Our primary areas of research include (but are by no means limited to):

• Forgery, provenance, creative history, and cultural heritage
• Authorship and scribal practice
• Memory and cognition
• The construction of identity
• The relationship between academia and the public, expert and amateur