Peter Jan Margry (born April 6, 1956) is a Dutch historian and European ethnologist who was till November 2022 professor European Ethnology at the University of Amsterdam and, from 1993 to 2022, senior fellow at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences research center Meertens Institute in the Netherlands.

From 2004 to 2015 he was executive vice-president/secretary of SIEF,[1] the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore, during which time he was instrumental in the regeneration of this professional organization of now mainly European and North-American ethnologists/anthropologists and folklorists.

"[12] After the killing of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 he acquired the letters and mementos [13] posted at the various spontaneous or grassroots memorials in the Netherlands for the Meertens Institute and started to publish on them as well as on ritual practices related to mourning and protest after traumatic death.

His current research involves also the politics of UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage convention (2003), in particular in relation to Dutch practices that caught international attention, as was the case for the Saint Nicholas tradition with his 'blackface' helper 'Zwarte Piet'.

[18] Due to his research on pilgrimage culture, he played an important role in the discovery [19] of the scholarly misconduct and fraud of the endowed professor of political anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Mart Bax.