Dominique Poulot is a professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he headed the doctoral school of History of Art 2010-2014. He is a specialist of cultural history of heritage.

He was trained as an historian (Ecole Normale Supérieure and agrégation, 1978), with a PhD in eighteenth-century history, and a post-doc at the EUI (1990), and a Habilitation in Art History (Grenoble II). Until 2000, he was professor of modern history, at Grenoble and Tours Universities, with a strong interest in French and European cultural history of art – he wrote Les Lumières in 2000 (Presses universitaires de France). During the years 1993-2000 he was associated researcher in the Center for Sociology of Organizations - CNRS, where he studied the European Museums in a comparative perspective. In 2000 he was elected on a chair of Modern art history in Sorbonne, with a specialty in Heritage Studies. He taught the history of collections and museums at the Ecole du Louvre. He was member of the Institut Universitaire de France (Junior, 1993-1997 and senior 2007-2012). He is member of the Scientific Committee of the Louvre Museum, after being member of the Quai Branly Museum Committee for research, and he is also member of the Committee for the Scientific heritage (PATSTEC).

He has been a visiting professor at Laval, Columbia, NYU, UQAM, the University of Montreal and Bologna, and fellow of various institutes of advanced studies – Jean Monnet Fellow (1990-91), Getty Scholar (2009- 2010), Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow at CASVA (2013), Senior Fellow Institute of Advanced Studies of Bologna University (2019), CNRS Senior Fellow (2019-2021), Visiting Professor of the Italian-French University (Sept-October 2020).

In 2003-2006 he worked on the contemporary anthropology of Heritage at the CNRS and he published a Histoire du patrimoine en Occident in 2006, and articles about the French Anthropologist Marc Augé and his theory of Heritage, and about emotions and heritage, for example the Cathars. From 2016 to 2019 he was part of a multi-disciplinary team of anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, who organized at EHESS a seminar about the writing of colonial history in European Museums (to be published). In this perspective he collaborated with the Association of Critical Heritage studies and was part of the team in charge of the Critical Heritage studies 2nd conference in Montreal.

He is in charge of Culture & Musées (Open Edition) and a member of the editorial boards of Museum and Society (Leicester), Future Anterior (Minnesota University Press), Ethnologies -- Yearly Journal of Canadian Folklore Studies (Laval), Patrimonio Industriale (AIPAI Italy), International Journal of Museum studies (Italy), and Museus e Estudos interdisciplinares (Lisbon). He is part of the project of the French Association of Curators to write a national survey of the organisations and professions of the museums (2020-2022).