Authors

Marnie Badham received her PhD in creative arts and cultural policy from the University of Melbourne in 2012, where she currently works as a research fellow at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships. Badham also holds an MA in community cultural development (University of Melbourne, 2008), as well as a BA in art history and BFA in InterArts (University of Melbourne, 1996). As an artist-researcher, her current research explores socially engaged arts practices, cultural value, and the politics of measurement. She is a collaborator on two Canadian arts-based research grants through the University of Regina (“Mapping the Saskatchewan Arts Ecology”) and Thompson Rivers University (“Artist Statements: Making Interdisciplinary Research Visible”). Badham presents and publishes internationally and also maintains an active socially engaged arts practice.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is a historian, artist, and currently a Humboldt Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She holds a PhD and MA in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University and an ongoing Newton Fellowship from the British Academy. Her revision of non-Western art history Art in the Time of Colony will appear in 2014 in Ashgate’s series on Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000. Her most recent commissions as an artist are 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Reenactment, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and The Rise and Fall, for the 2012 Marrakech Biennale. She has also published widely on artists’ interventions in the museum.

Sergio Jarillo de la Torre has recently completed his PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge with a study on contemporary materializations and social change in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. He studied law in Spain (BA, Autonomous University of Madrid) and art history and museum studies in Italy (University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”). In 2011 he started working on an ongoing Smithsonian Institution project based at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, involving the repatriation of oral narratives to the Trobriand Islands, as part of the Smithsonian’s Recovering Voices program. Jarillo de la Torre’s principal research focus is centered on Melanesia, and he is particularly interested in the relations between art, identity, religion, and politics.

Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture completing his PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge. His thesis focuses on the aesthetic, social, ideological, and political-economic relations between the Palace of Culture and Science—a 231-meter Stalinist skyscraper in central Warsaw—and the contemporary city. His research on Warsaw has resulted in several journal articles, book chapters, and popular publications in Polish and English. Since 2010, he has taught urban anthropology and social theory at Cambridge.

James Oliver is the graduate research coordinator at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne, where he also teaches at postgraduate and undergraduate levels. He has conducted a variety of ethnographic projects in the Scottish Hebrides, where he is from, researching the Gaelic language, cultural identity, and place-based belonging. It was in this area that he completed his doctoral studies (University of Sheffield), after which he was awarded the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. Whilst maintaining an interest in that research he has transitioned into creative arts research and practice. Since 2005, he has worked with various community-based arts projects in the UK and Australia, with a range of practices across performance, public art, and socially engaged art. A key interest for Oliver is the development of practice-as-research methodologies, with particular reference to ethnographic theory and method, as well as contemporary arts theory and perspectives on social practice.

Felix Ringel, assistant professor/lecturer at the University of Vienna, holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He works on knowledge, time, and urban regeneration in medium-sized European cities. His primary research focus is on how people envision the future in times of postindustrial change.

Olga Sosnina holds a PhD in art history and is a senior research fellow at the Tsaritsyno National Museum (Department of Research), the curator of many interdisciplinary exhibits, and the editor of a number of edited collections. She studied history at Lomonosov Moscow State University at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Over the course of twenty years, she has curated the porcelain collection at the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Applied and Folk Art (Moscow) and studied the mutual influence of easel and applied arts in the context of Russian history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Starting in 2001, she spent seven years working in the Moscow Kremlin Museums, where, as a curator and an author, she she prepared the exhibit Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Kremlin Museum, Moscow, 2006) and the accompanying catalog. Currently, she is interested in Russian and Soviet art, the anthropology of art, relationship between art and power, aesthetics of the gift, diplomatic ceremonies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia, and the methodology of creating conceptual exhibits. She is the author and curator of a variety of interdisciplinary projects, as well as the author-editor and scientific editor for the following catalogs: Topography of Happiness: The Russian Wedding, XIX–XXI Centuries (2009), The Panorama of Empires: The Journey of Tsesarevich Nikolai Aleksandrovich to the East, 1890–1891 (2011), and Dictionary of the Caucasus (2012).

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, holding a BA (diplom) in ethnography and history from Lomonosov Moscow State University (1987) and a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University (1998). His research interests include the anthropology of the state and exchange, history of anthropology, aesthetics, and ethnographic conceptualism. He has published on the anthropology of Siberia and Russia, gifts to Soviet leaders, and the history of anthropology in the context of socialism and the Cold War.