Heritages of hunger : European famine legacies in current academic debates

European famines and their legacies continue to play a significant role in heritage practices and societal debates. This calls for an examination of recent scholarship about these heritages of hunger, as well as the formulation of future directions that the relatively young field of famine heritage studies could explore. This article engages with ground-breaking scholarship about famines in Finland, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Ukraine and Russia in relation to museology, heritage policies, commemoration, education and monument creation. It analyses major topics and trends in famine heritage studies, and assesses how insights from this field engage with and contribute to issues that are at the heart of heritage studies in general: diasporic heritage, participation, in- and exclusion, globalisation, victimhood and trauma. This article maps out the state of the art in European famine heritage studies and, additionally, investigates what future directions famine heritage studies may take, and what questions require further exploration