Search results
Nicholas Jeremy Thomas FBA FAHA (born 1960) is an Australian-born anthropologist, Professor of Historical Anthropology, and Director, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge since 2006, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2007.
Nicholas Thomas has been Director of the Museum since 2006. He is author or editor of nearly fifty influential books and exhibition catalogues, which have ranged widely over art in Oceania, European travel, colonial histories, museology and the history of collections.
Nicholas Thomas first visited the Pacific in 1984 to research his doctoral thesis on culture and change in the Marquesas Islands, which led to work ranging over Indigenous histories, cross-cultural encounters, colonialism and contemporary art.
In the end, The Return of Curiosity might have been either a more effective shorter essay, or a more convincing (if bulkier) monograph. But these were not the works that Thomas set out to write, and I for one have nevertheless been considerably enlightened by the book that he has written.
In this collection of essays, Nicholas Thomas, a leading theorist of historical anthropology, explores the historicization of cultural encounters in the region referred to as Oceania.
May 25, 2006 · The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology has announced the appointment of Nicholas Thomas as its new Director from October 2006. He later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific itself, and has written widely on art, voyages, colonial encounters, and ...
Nicholas Thomas is the director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His books include The Return of Curiosity: What Museums are Good for in the 21st Century (Reaktion Books, 2016) and Gauguin and Polynesia (Head of Zeus, 2024)
