Jane Anderson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at New York University. Her work is focused on the philosophical and practical problems of intellectual property law, repatriation and Indigenous rights. She works with a variety of Native American communities negotiating control and ownership over tribal knowledge resources and cultural heritage held within archives and museums. Her most recent project, with Kim Christen, is Local Contexts (www.localcontexts.org). This project includes the new Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels as an educational intervention to address the needs of Indigenous communities to manage their intellectual property rights and cultural heritage specifically within the digital environment.
Regina F. Bendix has taught at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen, Germany since 2001. The conceptual and historical work she carried out for her monograph In Search of Authenticity (Madison 1997) fostered her interest in questions at the intersection of culture, the economy and politics. She worked on tourism and heritage and led the multi-year, interdisciplinary research group on ‘The Constitution of Cultural Property’, in whose framework a number of co-edited volumes such as Heritage Regimes and the State (Göttingen 2013) and Between Imagined Communities and Communities of Practice (Göttingen 2015) have appeared.
Susan Benton holds a Juris Doctor degree in law and a PhD in anthropology. Susan has been active in private law practice in the United States since 1987 with a focus on issues affecting the cultural and creative sectors. For more than a decade, she has focused her research on issues involving indigenous cultural heritage, arts, and the law, including the processes of repatriation and their effects on groups and individuals. For more than 20 years, Susan has also taught courses at the doctoral and master’s levels on issues involving cultural heritage law, museum law, and the international arts and antiquities trade. Currently residing in Melbourne, Australia, Susan is active internationally with research, law practice, teaching, and speaking engagements.
Boatema Boateng is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California San Diego. Her research interests include critical legal studies, cultural studies, transnational gender studies, and African diaspora studies. She has published several articles and book chapters on the political and cultural dimensions of intellectual property law and her book The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here: Adinkra, Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011.
John Bradley is the Deputy Director of the Monash Indigenous Centre and has worked for 35 years in the Northern Territory of Australia. His research has centred on working with Indigenous peoples to record their own Indigenous knowledges in ways that are useful to them. He has also worked on a number of land and sea claims assisting Indigenous peoples in regaining their traditional lands. More recently he has been developing ways in which his own fieldwork can be returned to Indigenous communities, the animations project of which he is the director having been a part of this.
Neil Brodie is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. He graduated from the University of Liverpool with a PhD Archaeology in 1991 and has held positions at the British School at Athens, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, where he was Research Director of the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, Stanford University’s Archaeology Center, and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on issues concerning the illegal trade of cultural property, and has worked on archaeological projects in the United Kingdom, Greece and Jordan.
Rosemary J. Coombe is the Tier One Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Culture at York University in Toronto, where she teaches in the Department of Anthropology, the York and Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, and the Graduate Program in Socio-legal Studies. She holds a joint doctorate in Law and Anthropology from Stanford University. She has been awarded visitorships at Harvard, MIT, Iowa, American, De Paul, the University of Chicago and the University of California and has held research fellowships at the University of Utrecht, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Göttingen. Her award-winning book The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties (1998) was reprinted in 2008 by Duke University Press. Other publications and works in progress may be found at http://rcoombe.blog.yorku.ca/.
Lee Douglas is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology and a graduate of the Culture and Media Program at New York University. She holds an MSc in Visual Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the intersection of forensic science, archival practice, and photographic documentation during the excavation of mass graves and the identification of remains in post-Franco Spain. Paying close attention to engagements with forensic evidence, her research considers what the entanglement between science, documentary practice, and visual representation reveals about the production and mobilization of knowledge in times of economic austerity and political change.
Shannon Faulkhead’s research concentrates on the location of Koorie peoples and their knowledge within the broader Australian society and its collective knowledge as reflected through narratives and records. To date Shannon’s multi-disciplinary research has centred on community and archival collections of records. Being the Finkel Fellow, attached to Monash Country Lines Archive, Monash University, will allow for greater exploration and development in the area of Indigenous archiving.
Aaron A. Fox is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University. He is the author of Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Duke University Press, 2004). He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Haidy Geismar is Reader in Anthropology and Vice Dean for Strategic Projects at University College London where she co-directs the Digital Anthropology Program. With extensive fieldwork experience in Vanuatu, New Zealand and in numerous museums in Europe and North America her research interests focus on digital collections, indigenous intellectual and cultural property, critical museum studies, the anthropology of economy and exchange, material culture and materiality, and digital anthropology. Her most recent book is Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Intellectual and Cultural Property (Duke University Press, 2013). Geismar is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property and edits the popular weblog www.materialworldblog.com.
Patty Gerstenblith is distinguished research professor of law at DePaul University College of Law. She is secretary of the US Committee of the Blue Shield and was formerly president of the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cultural Property. In 2011, President Obama appointed her chair of the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the US Department of State. Her publications include the casebook Art, Cultural Heritage and the Law. Gerstenblith received her AB from Bryn Mawr College, PhD in art history and anthropology from Harvard University, and JD from Northwestern University.
D. Rae Gould is a member of the Nipmuc Nation of Massachusetts and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut, with a research focus on southern New England Native American culture and history. She has worked in New England and Washington, DC over the past 20 years on issues related to federal acknowledgement, NAGPRA and historic preservation.
Stefan Groth is a European Ethnologist/Cultural Anthropologist working on cultural heritage, normative dimensions of everyday culture, sports, and multilateral negotiations. He is a senior researcher and head of the Laboratory of Popular Culture Studies at the Institute of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich. Author of Negotiating Tradition: The Pragmatics of International Deliberations on Cultural Property (Göttingen 2012), he has published on normative dimensions of cultural property, traditional knowledge and intellectual property, and collaborative aspects of cultural heritage.
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein is Professor in the Department of Ethnology, Folklore, and Museum Studies at the University of Iceland, and current president of SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore). He holds an MA and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Valdimar chaired the Icelandic National Commission for UNESCO from 2011 to 2012. He has published on topics ranging from heritage theory to copyright, from UNESCO to medieval legends, and from traditional wrestling to CCTV surveillance. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, and Danish.
Morag M. Kersel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at DePaul University and a visiting fellow with the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. She co-directs the Follow the Pots Project (followthepotsproject.org), which traces the movement of Early Bronze Age pots from the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan. She recently co-authored (with Christina Luke) US Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage (Routledge 2013) and co-edited (with Matthew T. Rutz) Archaeologies of Text: Archaeology, Technology and Ethics (Oxbow 2014).
Jennifer Kramer holds a joint position at the University of British Columbia as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Curator, Pacific Northwest at the Museum of Anthropology. She works with First Nations on the Central Northwest Coast of British Columbia. Her research focuses upon art market economies, identity production, representation, repatriation, Aboriginal cultural tourism, Indigenous modernity, and collaborative and critical museology. Kramer is co-editor with Charlotte Townsend-Gault and Ki-ke-in of the multiple award-winning anthology Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas (UBC Press 2013). She curated the exhibition ‘Kesu’: The Art and Life of Doug Cranmer’ (with a complementing book of the same title with Douglas & McIntyre Press 2012) and authored Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity (UBC Press 2006).
Brent McKee is a graduate and researcher in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University. Brent is the lead animator on the Monash Country Lines Archive and the 3D animator and postproduction editor on the Visualising Angkor project.
Maria Montenegro has a Master’s in Museum Studies from New York University and is a PhD candidate in Information Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Her work is focused on the digital collaborations between museums and Native communities at the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems with intellectual property law. She also works with Jane Anderson at Local Contexts and with Kim Christen at the Sustainable Heritage Network.
Marama Muru-Lanning is Acting Director and a Senior Research Fellow at the James Henare Māori Research Centre for the University of Auckland. She is also an advisor of elderly health projects in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. Her research is concerned with debates and critical challenges in social anthropology where she focuses on the cultural specificity of Maori and their unique sense of place and belonging in New Zealand. What distinguishes Marama as a social scientist is her specialisation in water rights, environment and Indigenous issues. She holds a Royal Society Marsden Research Grant, is Chair of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania and is a Council member of the Journal of the Polynesian Society, New Zealand’s oldest scholarly journal.
Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, has written on Indigenous Australian culture, objects, and identity as they are understood both within local communities and circulated through different regimes of value. His books include Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (1986), Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2002), and edited volumes The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology and Art (co-edited with George Marcus, 1995), and The Empire of Things (2001). His current project involves the repatriation and ‘re-documentation’ of film footage from 1974 with the current Pintupi communities.
George Nicholas is a Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and an adjunct professor of Archaeology at Flinders University. He was the founding director of SFU’s Indigenous Archaeology Program in Kamloops (1991–2005), and has worked closely with Indigenous peoples for 30 years. Nicholas’ research focuses on Indigenous peoples and archaeology, intellectual property, the archaeology and human ecology of wetlands, and archaeological theory. He directed the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) project (2008–2016), an eight-year, international collaboration concerned with the theoretical, ethical, and practical implications of commodification and appropriation of heritage, and other flows of knowledge about the past, and with how these may affect communities, researchers, and other stakeholders. In 2013, he received the first ‘Partnership Impact Award’ from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Sita Reddy is a cultural sociologist, museum curator, and heritage policy worker, in no particular order but sometimes all at once. She writes on topics ranging from the history of Ayurveda, Yoga, and botanical art, to museum practices such as the decolonization of heritage archives and music repatriation. She has been Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, and most recently was Visiting Professor at the University of Hyderabad. Her curatorial experience includes a variety of exhibitions at the Sackler Gallery (Yoga: The Art of Transformation), NLM (Visible Proofs), Provisions Library (The Innocents), and the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad. She blogs occasionally at ajeebghar.com
Michael Rowlands is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Material Culture Studies at UCL. Recent field research has been on the histories and development of postcolonial museums and heritage conflicts in West Africa (Cameroon, Liberia, Mali). He is currently a co-investigator of a Leverhulme-funded research project on ‘Conflicts in Cultural Value: Localities and Heritage in South West China.’ He is also a co-director of UCL/CREDOC (Centre for Research in the Dynamics of Civilisation) seeking to reintroduce the concept of ‘civilization’ in the study of ancient and modern worlds.
Sandra Rozental received her PhD in Anthropology from New York University in 2012 and is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Her work explores the tangible residues of pre-Hispanic civilizations in Mexico by way of national patrimony claims on artifacts, territories and landscapes. She co-directed the feature-length documentary ‘The Absent Stone’ (2013) with Jesse Lerner; has published ‘In the Wake of Mexican Patrimonio: Material Ecologies in San Miguel Coatlinchan’, Anthropological Quarterly 89.1 (2016) and ‘Stone Replicas: The Iteration and Itinerancy of Mexican Patrimonio’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19.2 (2014); and co-edited the special dossier ‘Matters of Patrimony: Anthropological Theory and the Materiality of Replication in Contemporary Latin America’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 21.1 (2016).
Neil Asher Silberman is a historian and heritage scholar who is the author of more than a dozen books, from Digging for God and Country (1982) to The Bible Unearthed (2001). He is an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2004 to 2007 he served as director of the Ename Center in Belgium, and also served as president of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Interpretation and Presentation and as a member of the ICOMOS International Advisory Committee from 2005 to 2015. He is a managing partner of Coherit Associates, an international heritage consultancy.
Martin Skrydstrup, formerly a postdoc at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, Section for Global Development, University of Copenhagen, is affiliated with the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. He holds an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD also in cultural anthropology from Columbia University based on his dissertation entitled ‘Once Ours: The Making and Unmaking of Claims to Cultural Property’ (2010). He has served on the Board of Directors for ICME and as Adviser to ICOM’s Ethics Committee. His research straddles the disciplines of anthropology, science studies and history and is concerned most generally with relationships between expertise, governance and the constitution of natural and cultural resources.
Paul Tapsell is Chair of Māori Studies and a former Dean of Te Tumu, the School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies, at the University of Otago. Paul’s Māori ancestry originates out of the Bay of Plenty and Waikato regions. His research interests include Māori youth identity in twenty-first-century New Zealand, the role of cultural heritage and museums in nation states, and taonga trajectories in and beyond tribal contexts. Paul continues to build on his past museum experiences at Rotorua Museum (curator), Pitt Rivers Museum (doctoral research), post-doctoral studies (CCR/ANU) and Auckland War Memorial Museum (Director Māori). He is a former co-Chair of Museums Aotearoa and sat on Te Māori Manaaki Taonga Trust. Today he serves on the Otago Museum Trust Board, Pukaki Trust, Sir Hugh Kawharu Foundation, Te Potiki National Trust and as an Eisenhower Fellow (NZ). Paul’s most notable exhibitions are The New Dawn (1991), The Legacy of Houmaitawhiti (1993–1997), Ko Tawa – Maori Ancestors of New Zealand (2005–2008) and Te Ara – Māori Pathways of Leadership (2010–2014). His publications are not only academic in nature, but also include very accessible books on taonga and leadership (Pukaki, 2000, Ko Tawa, 2006, The Art of Taonga, 2011, and Te Ara, 2013) and most recently a digital web service, designed to assist urban-raised Māori youth reconnect to their ancestral communities (www.maorimaps.com).
Ana Filipa Vrdoljak is Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. She is the author of International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects (CUP, 2006) and editor of Culture and Human Rights (OUP, 2013) and International Law for Common Goods: Normative Perspectives in Human Rights, Culture and Nature (Hart, 2014). She is co-General Editor of the Oxford University Press book series Cultural Heritage Law and Policy and member of the Advisory Board of the International Journal of Cultural Property. She is a member of the Cultural Heritage Law Committee, International Law Association and secretary of the International Cultural Property Society.
Shu-Li Wang is assistant research fellow of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Wang obtained her PhD in anthropology from University College London. Her research interests lie in critical heritage studies, comparative museology, cultural memory and anthropology of nationalism, and her goal is to present an ethnography on archaeological and heritage works as the place to explore knowledge production and nation building in contemporary China. Currently, she is working towards the transformation of her PhD thesis into book form as The Heritage Complex in China – Yinxu Archaeological Park in the Making (to be published in the Routledge Critical Heritage series); she is also co-editing a volume entitled Heritage as Aid and Diplomacy in Asia.