Matters of Belonging

Wayne Modest is the Head of the Research Center for Material Culture, the research institute of the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Africa Museum and Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. He is also Professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Modest was previously head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London, and Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography in Kingston, Jamaica. He has published widely on issues of belonging and displacement; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices; and difficult/contested heritage with a special focus on slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism. His most recent publications include Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, with Tim Barringer), and "Anxious Politics in Postcolonial Europe" (American Anthropologist, 2017, with Anouk de Koning). Prof. Dr. Nicholas Thomas was an undergraduate at the Australian National University from 1979 to 1982; his BA (Honours) thesis, on Fijian politics, was supervised by Anthony Forge. He visited the Pacific first in 1984 to undertake doctoral research in the Marquesas Islands and has since written extensively on exploration and cross-cultural encounters and on art histories in the Pacific. He has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge since 2006. Doris Prlic is coordinator of the European cooperation project SWICH - Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage at Weltmuseum Wien (since January 2015). She previously worked as independent curator, realizing projects for different cultural organisations such as Festival der Regionen or afo - architekturforum oberoesterreich (Linz, Austria). Claudia Augustat is curator of the South America collections at Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna, with a regional focus on Amazonia. In her research, she concentrates on topics such as material culture and cultural memory, collaborative projects as well as decolonization of museum practice. She is project leader of SWICH - Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage (since January 2018).