I have a joint appointment teaching in the NYU anthropology department and the Program in Museum Studies which perfectly maps onto my own research and training. I'm an anthropologist who has worked for all of my academic and professional life in Museums. After working on projects at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Natural History Museum in London, and Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge, I undertook phd research at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and National Museum (http://www.vanuatuculture.org). Since completing my dissertation, my research and writing have focused on the ways in which museums change people's understandings of the importance of objects in their everyday lives. I focus particularly on issues around intellectual and cultural property, contemporary arts within museums, and the social life of museums within communities. My special area of curatorial practice is photography and I have worked on a number of photographic collections, for instance in Cambridge, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I am particularly interested in how photographs carry meanings with them as they travel and are reproduced in multiple contexts and in the effects of digitisation within museums on the power of images and objects.
Taking oral histories about historic photographs in Atchin, Vanuatu, July 2006.
At NYU I teach classes on issues of Materiality, Cultural Property and Museums, Anthropology and Museums.