Biografisk notat

Annie E. Coombes is Professor of Material and Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London where she is also Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery. Her research focuses on colonial histories and their legacy in the present in Britain, South Africa, Kenya and Australia. She also works with contemporary artists whose work addresses these legacies. Her books include Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Yale, 1994) and the award-winning History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Duke, 2003). She recently edited (with Ruth B. Phillips), Museum Transformations: Decolonization and Democratisation (Wiley/Blackwells, 2015).


Lotte Hughes is an historian of Africa and empire, with a Kenya specialism. She was formerly Senior Research Fellow at The Open University (UK), and is now an independent scholar. She has led major research projects on Kenya, including the AHRC-funded ‘Managing Heritage, Building Peace’ (2008-11, on which research this book is based), and the ESRC-funded ‘Cultural Rights and Kenya’s New Constitution’ (2014-17). She was consultant to the project ‘“Seeing” Conflict at the Margins’, based at the University of Sussex (2017-20). Other key publications include Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure (2006), and Environment and Empire (2007, co-author William Beinart)

Karega-Munene teaches anthropology and history at the United States International University, Nairobi. His research interests include human rights in relation to museums, dress and identity, and the construction and deconstruction of Kenyan ethnic identities.