Dr. Emma van Bijnen is the Editor-in-Chief of Amsterdam Museum Journal, the research and publications coordinator at Amsterdam Museum, as well as the general coordinator of the AMResearch Center.

She is a communication scientist with a doctorate in discourse and argumentation from Università della Svizzera italiana (CH), for which she was awarded the grade Summa Cum Laude (2020). She previously worked for the University of Amsterdam (NL) (2020-2026), her alma mater, as well as a visiting researcher at København Universitet (DK) (2018-2019). 

van Bijnen specialises in multidisciplinary research from a communication scientific perspective with a focus on common ground, in/exclusion and multimodality, which she applies in various contexts, including conflict, museums, art and advertisement.

Her current research interests include the ways in which art/objects have rhetorical and argumentative power, by which they reproduce or renegotiate norms in museums. In short: How can objects, texts and spatial design presented by museums affect how people think, feel and act? What are the underlying communicative mechanisms? What norms are being reproduced or challenged, and how is this done? 

Related to these questions, she works together with dr. Vanessa Vroon-Najem on rethinking 'impact research' in the cultural sector to include qualitative impact in what they have dubbed 'impact mapping'.

Van Bijnen has been with Amsterdam Museum since 2022, where she set up the Amsterdam Museum Journal (AMJournal) as the Editor-in-Chief (since 2023) and co-edited publications such as the peer reviewed 'The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past (Taylor and Francis; 2024) and the popular scientific 'Vrouwen van Amsterdam (WBooks; 2025).