Dr. Anaïs Mattez is a socio-legal scholar and a Laureate Fellow at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. Her academic work investigates the constitutive relationship between culture and international law, using cultural property as a lens to examine the construction of sovereignty and political authority in the postcolonial world. Her research has appeared in the Asian Journal of International Law, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, and the International Journal of Cultural Property. She is an Associate at the Harvard Asia Center and was previously a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. She is also a consultant to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
In her research, Dr. Mattez studies how states, museums, archaeologists, and domestic legal actors interpret and implement international legal doctrine. Her scholarship combines doctrinal analysis, legal history, archival research, museum fieldwork, and qualitative interviews. By focusing on the implementation of international cultural property law, she explores how legal authority is produced beyond courts and conventions and how legal practice shape nationhood, property, and sovereignty. Her current book project, Restitution of Cultural Property: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Twenty-First Century, develops a socio-legal account of how cultural property intervenes in the production of sovereignty and nationhood through comparative research across Asia and North America.
Dr. Mattez completed her PhD at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, where her dissertation, Restitution of Cultural Property in the Age of Internationalism and National Identities, traced the historical development of cultural property restitution by way of comparative case studies from China, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and Thailand. She previously earned master’s degrees in Law and Philosophy from the University of Louvain. During the academic years 2023-2025, she was a Research Associate at the Harvard Asia Center and a Visiting Scholar with the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School.
Alongside her academic research, Dr. Mattez has served as a consultant to UNESCO and co-coordinated the project Shared Heritage: Museums in Southeast Asia at UNESCO’s Bangkok Regional Office in partnership with the Temasek Foundation. She is also guest-editing a forthcoming Special Issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property entitled “Cultural Property in Southeast Asia: International Law, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Heritage.”
(2025). Indigenous Advocacy and the Compliance Mechanisms of the World Heritage Convention: a TWAIL Reading, The International Journal of Cultural Property, Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739124000250
(2024). When Did Everyone Start Talking About Heritage Restitution? And What Does International Law Have to Do with This? in International Law, Völkerrechtsblog. https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/when-did-everyone-start-talking-about-heritage-restitution-and-what-does-international-law-have-to-do-with-this/
(2024). Restitution of Cultural Property: The Rise and Fall of a Cosmopolitan Ideal, International Journal of Heritage Studies: IJHS, Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2284715
(2024). Cultural Treasures and Their Place of Origin: Crimean Treasures Return to Kyiv, in Heritage in War and Peace. Legal and Political Perspectives for Future Protection, Springer.link.springer.com/book/9783031473463
(2022) Ethnonationalism and Cultural Heritage Law in Myanmar. Santander Art and Culture Law Review, 217–244, 2022. https://www.ejournals.eu/SAACLR/First-View/2-2022/art/22610/
