Dr George Agbo

George Emeka Agbo is a postdoctoral research associate on the AHRC-funded Museum Affordances project that retraces the itineraries of British anthropologist, N. W. Thomas who worked in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. George is involved in the Thomas collection-based research at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, online dissemination of the project activities, fieldwork and workshops in Nigeria, exhibitions in Nigeria and the UK, and scholarly writing that draws on the project. George’s work on the Nigerian colonial history began in November 2017 with an AfOx Initiative-funded research on the photographic production of the Nigeria magazine of the 1930s at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Earlier in a doctoral project completed in April 2017, he explored how circulation and interaction around photographs on Facebook produce political critique of the Nigerian post-colonial conditions. A paper drawn from the thesis won the Best Student Paper Prize at the 2016 University of Minnesota International African Studies conference. The paper and a second one on the photographic visuality of Boko Haram insurgency will appear in forthcoming publications. Another has been published in Cahiers d’Édudes Africaines. George undertook the PhD in history (focusing on photography) as Andrew Mellon fellow and recipient of the Ivan Karp & Corinne Kratz Fund at the Centre for Humanities Research/History Department, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He holds a faculty position at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.