Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture

Professor Elizabeth Edwards is Research Professor of Photographic History and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre. A visual and historical anthropologist, she has worked extensively on the relationships between photography, anthropology and history in cross-cultural environments and on the social practices of photography. Her monographs and edited works include Anthropology and Photography (1992), Raw Histories (2001), Photographs Objects Histories (2004), Sensible Objects (2006), Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame (2009) and most recently The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885-1918, (2012). She has published over 70 essays in journals and exhibition catalogues over the years and was recently featured in 50 Key Writers on Photography (2013). She is on the board of major journals in the field including Visual Studies and History of Photography. She recently completed a major HERA/European-funded project on the role of the photographic legacy of the colonial past in contemporary Europe (http//:photoclec.dmu.ac.uk). Ruth Phillips is at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University, Canada.