Professor Nicholas Thomas

Nicholas Thomas has been Director of the Museum since 2006. He is currently on sabbatical. Sarah-Jane Harknett is Interim Director.

Nicholas 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).