Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University and Honorary Professor of Anthropology, University College London. Her books include Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (University of California Press, 1995), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage, 2005), Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Natural and Social Sciences (ed. with Andrew Barry, Routledge, forthcoming), and Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Between 2010 and 2015 she is directing the research programme ‘Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’, funded by the European Research Council.
Warren Boutcher is Reader in Renaissance Studies and Dean for Taught Programmes in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (School of English and Drama), Queen Mary, University of London. He has published many studies in the intellectual and literary history of the European Renaissance and is completing a monograph entitled The School of Montaigne (Oxford University Press) that applies Alfred Gell’s concept of art and agency to the history of the book.
Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University, London. She works on conversion to Christianity, ethnic citizenship, landscape, resettlement and conservation in Malaysian Borneo, and on artefact-oriented theory and museology more broadly. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo (2012).
Simon Dell is Senior Lecturer in Art History in the School of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Image of the Popular Front: The Masses and the Media in Interwar France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and editor of On Location: Siting Robert Smithson and his Contemporaries (Blackdog, 2008).
Mark Elliott is Curator in Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He has worked across archaeological and ethnographic collections and has curated and coordinated numerous exhibitions including, with Anita Herle and Rebecca Empson, Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination (MAA 2009–2010). His research and teaching interests include histories of museum practice in South Asia and Britain, and visual and material representations of Adivasi peoples in India.
Alfred Gell was Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. Apart from Art and Agency, his publications included Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries (1975), The Anthropology of Time (1992) and Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (1993).
Chris Gosden is Chair of European Archaeology, University of Oxford. He has worked in Britain, Papua New Guinea and Turkmenistan, and is the author and co-editor of several books on material culture, archaeology, colonialism and museums, including Sensible Objects: Material Culture, Colonialism, Museums (2006, co-edited with E. Edwards and R. Phillips) and A Technology of Enchantment? Exploring Celtic Art 400 BC–AD 100 (forthcoming, co-authored with D. Garrow). He is currently Principal Investigator on the ‘Landscapes and Identities: The Case of the English Landscape 1500 BC–AD 1086’ project.
Eric Hirsch is Reader and Head of Anthropology, Brunel University, London. He has a long-standing interest in the ethnography and history of Melanesia, having conducted research among the Fuyuge people of Papua New Guinea. He has also conducted fieldwork in Greater London, examining new technologies and domestic relations. His most recent book is the co-edited Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present (Berghahn Books, 2008).
Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. She has conducted long-term research in both parts of island New Guinea and Eastern Polynesia on issues of memory, the ontology and political economy of images, and the socialness of materials selection and translation and their relevance in understanding long-term change. Her major publications are Malanggan: Art, Memory and Sacrifice (2002), Pacific Pattern (2005) and Tivaivai: The Social Fabric of the Cook Islands (2009).
Jeremy Tanner studied classics at Queens’ College, Cambridge, sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Mandarin at National Taiwan University. He teaches classical and comparative art at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He has published widely in the history and sociology of art, with a particular focus on the development of comparative and sociological approaches to Greco-Roman art, and on developing dialogue between the theoretical traditions of art history and sociology. His current project is a comparative study of institutional change in classical Greek and early imperial Chinese art.
Nicholas Thomas is author, co-author or editor of more than thirty books, including Entangled Objects (1991), Oceanic Art (1995), Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (2003), and collaborations with Pacific artists, such as Hiapo (with John Pule, 2005), and Rauru (with Mark Adams, Lyonel Grant and James Schuster, 2009). Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010) was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. Thomas’s exhibitions have included ‘Skin Deep: A History of Tattooing’ for the National Maritime Museum, London, and ‘Cook’s Sites’ for the Museum of Sydney, as well as ‘Kauage: Artist of Papua New Guinea’ and several other shows at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, where he has been Director since 2006.