Alice Bernadac

Elizabeth Blake

Elizabeth gained her PhD from the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis was entitled ‘Stone “tools” as portable sound-producing objects in Upper Palaeolithic contexts: the application of an experimental study’. In 2015 she curated the micro gallery exhibition ‘Sounding Out the Morning Star- Music and West Papua’, with Senior Research Associate Julie Adams.

Alice Christophe

Alice is a PhD candidate at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Her thesis, entitled ‘Exhibiting Connections, Connecting Exhibitions: towards a redefinition of Pacific networks’, focuses on the ways in which exhibitions and exhibiting processes allow the development of networks in the Pacific. Alice has been assisting Senior Research Associate Lucie Carreau with the documentation, photography and research of MAA’s collections of paddles and clubs from the Solomon Islands.

Ulrike Folie

Ulrike is a visual anthropologist based in Berlin. She is particulary interested in filmmaking and ways of documenting human interaction and relationships. For the Pacific Presences project she has been doing collections based research and photography in the stores and galleries of the South Sea Department of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin.

Eve Haddow

Eve is a PhD student in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. For the Pacific Presences project she is conducting field research in Vanuatu on the collections made aboard the H.M.S Royalist in 1890-1. Her research will form the basis of a chapter for a book on the H.M.S Royalist by Research Associate Alison Clark.

Rachel Howie

Rachel is a conservator working at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge on the extensive loan program. She has worked on a range of objects and materials, from barkcloth to a Bronze-Age shield. For the Pacific Presences project Rachel will be researching and conserving a coconut fibre cuirass, and a porcupine fish helmet from Kiribati that will be going on display at the museum in 2017. This will include looking into material identification, manufacture and use.

Ilka Kottman

Ilka is a social anthropologist who completed her Master’s thesis on the Polynesian voyaging revival in Aotearoa New Zealand in the late 1990s. Thereafter she worked as a junior research fellow on Pacific collections at the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg in Germany. As a PP project intern her research is focused on German collections with particular attention to German women collectors and Polynesian artefacts.

Remke van der Velden

Remke is the Collections Assistant for Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. Her previous projects have included a textile store move and repack, work on the Northcote W. Thomas collections and the Fiji Project. In March 2014 Remke worked as an Intern for the Pacific Presences project. She documented and photographed most of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s Micronesian collection, comprising around 250 objects from Kiribati, Nauru, Palau, the Caroline Islands and the Marshall Islands.

Emily Wilkes

Emily is a final year master’s student in the Department of Archaeology at University of Oxford. She is particularly interested in the management and conservation of museum collections, including the way in which they are made accessible to members of the public. Between October and December 2015 Emily completed an internship with the Pacific Presences project. She researched the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s collection of objects made from gourd material, recording descriptions of the items, their dimensions and taking photographs. The work was pursued with the intention of improving the museum’s database, enhancing the digital material available to researchers. It is also part of a wider project in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, which aims to carry out DNA analysis on samples of gourd material in order to increase our understanding of the spread and domestication of the plant.