The Globe in a Glass Case

Ethnographic Collections in Ireland

Biographies of Speakers at the Conference

Gosewijn van Beek is an anthropologist, museum consultant and independent writer. After extensive field research in Papua New Guinea he gained his PhD (cum laude) in Leiden with art anthropologist Adriaan A.Gerbrands. Since then, he specializes in the anthropology of material culture and museum theory. After lecturing at the Reinwardt Academy for Museology (Amsterdam School of the Arts), he was appointed at the Anthropological Institute of the University of Amsterdam. He has widely lectured abroad (London, Heidelberg, Paris, Viennna, Stolkholm), lately as guest professor in Oslo. Among his publications are The Way of All Flesh (diss.), the award winning Red Calico – Rood katoen (with Roy Villevoy) and Het Galgemaal (forthcoming). He has written numerous chapters and articles on topics related to (contemporary) material culture and museums, such as Cultuur, materiële cultuur en musea  (with Daniel Miller) and On Materiality. He has also organized several exhibitions at home and abroad, and was consultant to leading museums in the Netherlands and Austria. 

Anthony D Buckley is an anthropologist, formerly curator at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in Cultra, Co Down. His responsibility was to collect, research and present to the public aspects of the community life of Northern Ireland. His interests have included medicine, ethnicity, religion and secretive brotherhoods. He is currently examining the relation between theatre, ritual and sport. Before coming to the Museum, his doctoral thesis was a study of traditional medicine in Nigeria. Publications include Yoruba Medicine; A Gentle People; Negotiating Identity; Symbols in Northern Ireland. 

Pat Cooke is Director of the MA programme in Cultural Policy and Arts Management at UCD. He had over twenty years experience working for Ireland’s state heritage service before taking over his present post in 2006. As a heritage sector manager, he pioneered the use of museums and historic properties in Ireland as sites for major art projects. His management experience in the heritage field included producing cultural and historical exhibitions and audio-visual presentations. He is a former Chairman of the Irish Museums Association, and worked as advisor to the Irish Heritage Council in developing its Accreditation programme for Irish museums. His research interests are in cultural policy and management within the cultural sector. In 2003 he produced a policy paper on the management of Irish Heritage while a fellow at TCD’s Policy Institute.

Winifred Glover is Curator of World Cultures in the History Division of the Ulster Museum, Belfast. A graduate of Queen's University, Belfast, her special interests include the history of ethnographic collections and the Armada of 1588. She has published widely in archaeological and historical journals and written catalogues and curated many exhibitions of the Museum's collections.

Rachel Hand is Curatorial Assistant for Anthropology, University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Rachel has recently catalogued the Pacific, African and Americas ethnographic collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin. As part of this project new material that may have been colleted on the second and third Cook voyages has come to light and new information has been gathered on the individual collectors and explorers. She has worked with the historic ethnographic collections at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and has now returned to Cambridge, where she continues her research into early Pacific collections.

Bill Hart is currently the Head of the School of History and International
Affairs in the University of Ulster. He has published widely on the
traditional arts of Sierra Leone and on the art history of the Upper Guinea
Coast. He has a particular interest in the history of collecting African
artefacts and early museum collections. Bill Hart is author of ‘African Art in the National Museum of Ireland’, African Arts, Spring 1995, pp. 35-47, and 90.

Anne O'Dowd is Curator in the Irish Folklife Division of the National Museum of Ireland. She is fairly widely published on folklore and folklife, her main published research being on seasonal workers and migratory labourers to Ireland, Scotland and England. Her current research is on the use of organic fibres for functional and ceremonial objects and she has interests in wide folklife, ethnological area. 

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin is Statutory Lecturer and Head of the Department of
Folklore and Ethnology, UCC. He is author of Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition,
Modernity, Identity (2000) and of An Dúchas agus an Domhan (2005). His
main research interests include the development and the discourses of folklore studies, ethnographic collections and museums, and popular religion, and he furthers these in a comparative international context, especially with the Nordic and Baltic countries, France and Latin America.

Laura Peers is Curator for the Americas collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. An anthropologist and historian, she is interested in the meanings of historic artefacts to First Nations/Native American communities and in the relations between museums and Indigenous peoples. Her recent work focuses on artefacts as sites of social memory, embodiments of traditional knowledge, and sources for the construction of contemporary Native identities. Publications include: 2007 (at press), ‘On the treatment of dead enemies: indigenous human remains in Britain in the early 21st century’, in Helen Lambert and Maryon Macdonald (eds) Social Bodies; 2007 (at press), Playing Ourselves: Native American and First Nations Interpreters at Historic Reconstructions. Maryland: AltaMira Press; 2006 (with Alison Brown and members of the Kainai Nation), Pictures Bring Us Messages/Sinaakssiiksi Aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation. University of Toronto Press; 2004, ‘Repatriation: a gain for science?’, Anthropology Today, Dec.2004, 20 no.6, pp.3-4;
2003 (coedited with Alison Brown), Museums and Source Communities: a Routledge Reader, Routledge.

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Last Updated: 22.09.2005