Dr Anita Herle

Dr Anita Herle: Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor

Anita Herle was Professor of Museum Anthropology and Senior Curator at MAA, with responsibility for Pacific, Americas and Photographic collections until September 2023. For over 25 years, she has worked to make collections accessible to communities of origin and has been involved in numerous collaborative research and exhibition projects at MAA and in Torres Strait, Fiji, Vanuatu and Canada.

Her ongoing research explores a range of ethnographic, disciplinary and colonial contexts for collections cared for by MAA. Within the early history of British anthropology, she has explored the intersection between different knowledge systems, the complex relations that develop in the anthropological field and the potency of objects and photographs in relational encounters.

Anita completed a long-term project with Dr Jude Philp (University of Sydney), in collaboration with Islander communities, to publish Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon's Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898. The book won the Australian Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize in 2022. She led a multidisciplinary project on colour culminating in an exhibition at MAA COLOUR: Art, Science & Power (26 July 2022 – 23 April 2023) and a virtual exhibition.

Current research includes: Museum histories, nature/culture relations with reference to the Amazonian practice of tapirage (changing the colour of feathers on living parrots), and exploring museum objects as repositories of environmental and cultural knowledge.