The research team

Professor Elizabeth Edwards (PhotoCLEC Project Leader and Principal Investigator UK, De Montfort University, Leicester) is an historical and visual anthropologist. After curatorial and academic posts in Oxford and London she is now Research Professor and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University.  She works on the relationship between photography, anthropology and history, on photographs as material culture and the history of collecting and institutional practices and has published extemsively in the field, including Raw Histories (2001), The Camera as Historian (2012) and jointly edited volumes Photographs Objects Histories (2004) and Photography, Anthropology and History (2010).

More information: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/aad/photographic-history-research-centre/staff/elizabeth-edwards.jsp

Professor Susan Legêne (PhotoCLEC Principal Investigator, The Netherlands, VU University, Amsterdam) is professor of Political History at VU University, Faculty of Arts/History Department. Prior to this, she was head of the Curatorial Department of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the ways in which material and visual collections from the colonial past provide valuable sources to explore processes of cultural canon formation through past academic research traditions and exhibition practices. In this context, PhotoCLEC is also linked to her international research programme Sites, Bodies and Stories; the dynamics of heritage formation in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia and the Netherlands (2008-2013).

More information: http://www.let.vu.nl/en/about-the-faculty/academic-staff/staff-listed-alphabetically/staff-l-s/prof-dr-s-legene/index.asp

Professor Sigrid Lien (PhotoCLEC Principal Investigator, Norway, University of Bergen) is Professor of Art History at the University of Bergen. She has worked extensively on photography and Norwegian culture, and on the visual culture of Norwegian emigration, especially to the United States. She is head of the research group Visual Culture, University of Bergen, (since 2007), a member of leadership group of the NordForsk network Visions of th Past: Images as Historical Sources and the History of Art History (2008-2011), and a member of leadership group of the NordForsk network Nordic Network for the History and Aesthetics of Photography (2003-2007).

More information: http://www.hf.uib.no/lle/ansatte_presentasjon/Sigrid_Lien.htm

Dr Matt Mead (PhotoCLEC Research Officer UK, De Montfort University) currently holds Honorary Research Fellowships in the Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities, De Montfort University and the Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck (University of London). He was awarded his doctorate in Critical Theory by the University of Nottingham in 2010 and was Research Fellow on the PhotoCLEC project, first at the University of the Arts, London and then at De Montfort University between 2010 and 2012. Dr Mead's work is interdisciplinary in nature and contributes to the study of memory cultures in contemporary literature, museum culture and photography. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Kunapipi.

Dr Hilde Nielssen (PhotoCLEC Research Officer, Norway, University of Bergen) is a social anthropologist and research fellow at The Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen. Her research ranges from ritual theory and spirit possession in Madagascar, to museums and colonial culture. Recent publications include Ritual Imagination. A Study of Spirit Possession among the Betsimisaraka in Eastern Madagascar (Brill 2011), and Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Unto the Ends of the World, co-edited with Inger Marie Okkenhaug & Karina Hestad Skeie (Brill 2011).

Professor Pamela Pattynama (PhotoCLEC Research Officer, The Netherlands, University of Amsterdam) is Indisch Huis Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Culture History, in which she specializes in the Netherlands-Indies. She teaches film studies and literary studies at the University of Amsterdam and has published widely on (post)colonial discourse, cultural memory and the representation of gender and ‘mixed race’ in Dutch (post-)colonial films and literature.  Another focal point in her research is the formation of identities and memory in migrant communities. She is currently working on a book on postcolonialism and cultural memory in literature, photographs and film.

More information: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/p.pattynama/

Museum Professional Secondments: 

Daan Van Dartel (The Netherlands)

Jaina Mistry (UK)

Edy Seriese (The Netherlands).

Additional material for this website was provided by Martijn Eickhoff , Malika Kraamer, Wim Manuhutu, Chris Morton and Thomas Michael Walle. The design is by Sophie Clarke.