Biography
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. Foundation Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University (1996-99) and Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London (1999-2006), since 2006 he has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and a Fellow of Trinity College.
He is author or editor of some fifty books, including Entangled Objects (1991), which influentially contributed to a revival of material culture studies, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (1999), Discoveries: the voyages of Captain Cook (2003) and Islanders: the Pacific in the age of empire (2012), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize; and several co-authored with Pacific artists and Indigenous scholars. He co-curated 'Oceania' for the Royal Academy in London and Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris (2018-19), which attracted over 250,000 visitors and was acclaimed as a landmark exhibition. He writes for The Art Newspaper, Apollo and the Financial Times about restitution, museum issues and contemporary art; his most recent book is Gauguin and Polynesia (2024).
Publications
2024 Gauguin and Polynesia. London: Head of Zeus / New York: Bloomsbury
2022 (with Mark Adams) Photo-Museology: the presence of absence and the absence of presence. Pacific Presences VII. Leiden: Sidestone
2022 Possessions: Indigenous art/colonial culture/decolonization, second ed. London: Thames and Hudson
2021 Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific. London: Head of Zeus / New York: Basic Books
2020 Océaniens: histoire du Pacifique à l'âge des empires, tr. Paulin Dardel, preface by Eric Wittesheim, 510 pp. Paris: Anarchasis
2019 (with Elena Govor) Tiki: Marquesan art and the Krusenstern voyage. Leiden: Sidestone
2019 (with Wayne Modest, Claudia Augustat and Doris Prilić) Matters of belonging: ethnographic museums in a changing Europe. Leiden: Sidestone
2018 Oceanic art, second edition. London: Thames and Hudson (World of Art series)
2018 Discoveries: the voyages of Captain Cook, second edition. London: Penguin
2018 (with Lucie Carreau, Alison Clark, Alana Jelinek and Erna Lilje) Pacific presences: Oceanic art and European museums. Leiden: Sidestone
2018 (with Peter Brunt) Oceania. London: Royal Academy of Arts
2018 ‘The museum as method, revisited’. In Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarthy (eds.) Curatopia: museums and the future of curatorship, 19-28. Manchester: Manchester University Press
2018 ‘Human flow in Melanesia: Taloi Havini’s artefacts and habitats’, Artlink 38 (3): 38-43
2018 'Artist of PNG': Mathias Kauage and Melanesian modernism. In Elizabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips (eds.) Mapping modernisms: art, indigeneity, colonialism, 163-186. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
2018 A case of identity: the artefacts of the 1770 Kamay (Botany Bay) encounter. Australian Historical Studies 49: 4-27
2018 'A great collection of curiosities from the South Sea Islands': William Hunter's ethnography. In Mungo Campbell and Nathan Fils (eds.) William Hunter and the anatomy of the modern museum, 130-145. New Haven: Yale University Press
2018 Culture and imperialism: John Pule's painting, 1990-2010. In Michelle Keown, Andrew Taylor and Mandy Treagus (eds.) Anglo-American Imperialism in the Pacific, 131-145. London: Routledge
2018 'Artist of PNG': Mathias Kauage and Melanesian modernism. In Elizabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips (eds.) Mapping modernisms: art, indigeneity, colonialism, 163-186. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
2018 'Specimens of bark cloth, 1769': the travels of textiles collected on Cook's first voyage. Journal of the History of Collections
2018 A case of identity: the artefacts of the 1770 Kamay (Botany Bay) encounter. Australian Historical Studies 49: 4-27
