board of advisors member

Haidy Geismar, University College London
Haidy Geismar is Professor of Anthropology at University College London where she is also the curator of the Ethnography Collections and co-directs the Digital Anthropology Programme. She is also Faculty Vice Dean (Strategic Projects) for Arts and Humanities and Social and Historical Science where she is developing a new School for Creative and Cultural Industries at UCL East. She has fieldwork experience in Vanuatu and New Zealand dating back to 2000. Her research focuses on museums and collections as sites of knowledge and value production, and she has written on a wide range of topics including the art market, postcolonial museologies, the production of indigenous intellectual and cultural property, the history of ethnographic collections, the epistemology of digital processes in diverse cultural contexts, and the social resonance of historical photographic collections in present day communities. Recent books include Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography in Malakula since 1914 (2010, Hawaii University Press, winner of the 2012 John Collier Prize for Still Photography from the Society for Visual Anthropology), The Routledge Cultural Property Reader (with Jane Anderson, 2017), and Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (2018, University College London Press). She is an active curator, developing exhibitions for the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the East West Gallery, Honolulu, and at UCL.