Biography

Elizabeth joined the University of Canberra in August 2010 as Assistant Professor in Museum Studies. She is an anthropologist and has worked in museums for over twenty years, both as a collection manager and as a researcher.  Her primary research interest focuses on the material culture and cultural heritage of Melanesia, and she has carried out fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.

She has recently completed work on the Melanesia Art Project, a joint research project between the British Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge, UK. This five year project investigated the significance of the British Museum’s collection from West Papua, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. She is co-editor of Melanesia: Art and Encounter planned for publication in 2011 and which provides a commentary of the projects carried out, presenting a diverse range of approaches and understandings of the material culture of the region, and it’s relevance to indigenous people of the area today.

Elizabeth graduated from the University of Queensland in 1984 and then carried out voluntary work on the Oceanic collections at the Queensland Museum where she developed her interest in the material culture of Melanesia. She moved to Sydney to undertake a postgraduate diploma in Museum Studies at the University of Sydney in 1986 and then commenced work at the Australian Museum, Sydney where, once again, she worked with the Pacific collections. She held a number of collection management positions within the Anthropology Division and was the Senior Collection Manager of the Anthropology Collections for a number of years until her departure in 2005. During this time she completed her Master of Arts at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research, Australian National University, focusing her research upon the ethnographic collection made by the anthropologist Sir Professor Raymond Firth while in Tikopia, Solomon Islands in 1928/29. Elizabeth gained her PhD in social anthropology from the Australian National University in 2005, her thesis titled “The struggle for Wanigela: representing social space in a rural community in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea”.

Elizabeth is interested in all aspects of material culture studies, museums as ethnographic sites and “contact zones ”, and issues relating to museum objects and the indigenous peoples especially in Melanesia.

Selected Publications

In press  “Melanesia: Art and Encounter” co-editors Lissant Bolton,  Nicholas Thomas and Julie Adams, British Museum  Press: London

2011 “Collecting Relations: contemporary collecting in Papua New Guinea”, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 23

2009    “A personal narrative of particular things: feather money from Santa Cruz”, in The Australian Journal of Anthropology (20): 74- 92.


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