UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Families Education Officer
Brook Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist who examines dominant narratives, often relating to colonialism from a Wiradjuri/Celtic Australian perspective, and has recently been appointed as Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney for 2020. Through his museum and archival research, interventions and curatorial projects, he aims to make forgotten stories visible and offer alternative choices for interpreting history in the world today. Apart from drawing inspiration from vernacular objects and the archive, he travels internationally to work with communities and various private and public collections. Brook is currently completing a DPhil at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. Brook is drawing on the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum as part of his research, and is being co-supervised by one of the Museum's curators, Dr Christopher Morton.
From 2016 to 2018, Brook was chief investigator of an international comparative three-year Federal Government Australian Research Council project Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial, which responded to the repeated high-level calls for a national memorial to Aboriginal loss and the frontier wars. In 2017, Brook was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington; and artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin from July 2017 to June 2018.
In 2017, Brook created the installation Ahy-kon-uh-klas-tik, an interrogation of the Van Abbemuseum archives and art collection in Holland, which imagined a different world timeline. The same year, he created Room A, a curatorial and art intervention into the collection of the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève in Switzerland, and his 25-year reflection on his practice The Right to Offend is Sacred opened at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.
Coote, Jeremy and Jeremy Uden. (2013) The rediscovery of a society Islands Tamau, or headdress of human hair, in the "Cook-voyage" Forster collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum - and a possible provenance' [online], Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 122, No. 3, Sep 2013: 233-255.:<https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=173296449307125;res=IE... 0032-4000. [cited 29 Nov 19].
Job Titles:
- Research Curator ( African Archaeology ) Deputy Head of Research
Ashley Coutu is Research Curator (African Archaeology) and Deputy Head of Research at the Pitt Rivers Museum. She received a BA from Boston College, USA in 2005, then moved to the UK to complete an MPhil in World Archaeology from the University of Cambridge in 2007. From 2007-2011, she completed her PhD as a Marie Curie Early Career Researcher on the EU-funded Historical Ecologies of East African Landscapes project at the University of York. Her PhD used a combination of archival, archaeological, and biomolecular data to understand the impacts of the 19th century ivory trade on elephants, humans, and landscapes along caravan routes in East Africa. In 2012, she moved to Denmark as a postdoctoral researcher on the Entrepôt project and from 2013-2017 was based at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, holding a Claude Leon fellowship and then a Marie Curie International fellowship. The two fellowships centred on a project to map African ivory trade networks from the last 2,000 years by analysing ivory working materials, ivory objects, and other small finds from archaeological sites across southern Africa. After moving back to the UK in 2017, Ashley spent time as a Visiting Research fellow at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia and then took up a post as a Lecturer in Archaeology at Newcastle University, where she developed curriculum in global medieval archaeology with collections at the Great North Museum.
Coutu, A.N. (2015) 'Investigating ivory trade with ZooMS analysis'. In Sian Tiley-Nel and Annie Antonites (eds) Archaeological worked bone and ivory: A guide to best practice in preservation, research and curation. University of Pretoria, South Africa, 34-36.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Director
- Deputy Director and Head of Curatorial, Research and Teaching at the Pitt Rivers Museum
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Christopher Morton (MA MSt DPhil, Oxf) is Deputy Director and Head of Curatorial, Research and Teaching at the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College. He trained in History at the University of East Anglia before undertaking MSt and DPhil studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology at St Antony's College, Oxford, between 1995 and 2002, during which time he conducted long-term fieldwork in Botswana. He joined the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2002 as a curatorial assistant and in 2006 he was appointed Curator of Photograph and Manuscript Collections, a specialist curatorial role that he continues to undertake at the Museum, alongside leading the Research team and managing the Balfour Library. Dr Morton is also the Museum's digital lead, responsible for the Museum's digital transformation programme including new CMS-DAMS and Collections Online initiatives. He has curated over 35 exhibitions and published over 50 books and articles on the history of photography.
Dr Morton is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society as well as the Royal Anthropological Institute, serving on its Council as a Trustee in 2016-18, as well as being a member of its Photographic Committee. From 2012 to 2018 he was Departmental Lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford. Dr Morton is an Advisory Board member for the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology as well as the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and an editorial board member of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO).
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Project Researcher / Junior Research Fellow, St Peter 's College
Mary-Ann Middelkoop is a Researcher on the AHRC-DFG funded project ‘The Restitution of Knowledge' at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a Junior Research Fellow in History of Art at St Peter's College, Oxford. She completed her PhD ‘Art and Foreign Cultural Policy in Weimar Germany, 1917-1933' in History at the University of Cambridge in 2019. She has previously worked as a researcher at the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, London, and contributed to the development of the ‘Looted Art 1939-1961' database for the National Archives in Kew Gardens. Prior to becoming a Researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Mary-Ann was a Teaching Associate in the Department of History of Art, Cambridge, and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, with the project ‘A Thing of Fragile Beauty: Porcelain, War and Plunder in the Third Reich, 1939-1949'. Her current research focuses on German modernism, Nazi- and colonial-era looted art and artefacts, and she has a continuing interest in the study of Raubkunst and restitution in comparative perspective. She is co-convenor of the DAAD funded workshop series ‘Thinking Provenance, Thinking Restitution'.
Job Titles:
- Head of Administration, Planning and Finance
Head of Administration, Planning and Finance, Karrine Sanders; karrine.sanders@prm.ox.ac.uk
Job Titles:
- Marketing and Press Officer
Job Titles:
- Curator of World Archaeology / Professor of Contemporary Archaeology