Professor Haidy Geismar FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
Summary
Haidy Geismar is Professor of Anthropology at University College London, and Founding Director of the UCL School for the Creative and Cultural Industries where she has created a new institutional hub for innovative approaches in academic research, teaching and sector engagement focused on art and creative practice, media and technology, public history, museum studies and immersive storytelling. Her research explores the intersection of cultural and intellectual property, indigenous knowledge systems, critical museology and digital anthropology.
Since 2000 she has worked with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, in museums across New Zealand, and in Europe and North America conducting ethnographic work that examines how local communities navigate global intellectual property frameworks, in particular through emerging indigenous forms of contemporary art and curating. She has published extensively on these topics, for instance, her monograph (co-authored with Anita Herle), Moving Images (2010), explored the resonance of historical photographs in Vanuatu over one hundred years and won the Collier Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology. Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property (Duke University Press, 2013) demonstrates how Pacific peoples are actively reconfiguring international cultural property regimes, challenging conventional Western legal frameworks through everyday practices and policy interventions.
Other publications have established the growing sub-discipline of digital anthropology including Digital Anthropology (2022, co-edited with Hannah Knox) and Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (2018).
She has an active curatorial practice, curating the UCL Ethnography Collections, exhibitions in New York, Honolulu, Cambridge and London and establishing new spaces for collections at UCL including the Culture Lab and Urban Room and Memory Workshop. She sits on numerous international advisory boards and has had leading editorial roles within several subject specialist journals including the Journal of Material Culture and the International Journal of Cultural Property.
She chaired the Photography Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 2016 and 2024, founding a new open access journal, Anthropology and Photography.