Conal McCarthy is Professor and Director of the Museum & Heritage Studies programme at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand. He has published widely on museum history, theory and practice, including the books Exhibiting Māori (2007), Museums and Māori (2011), and Museum Practice (2015) which was part of a new series The International Handbooks of Museum Studies (Wiley Blackwell). In 2017, Conal was one of the authors of Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Government (Duke University Press), and a coeditor of a volume of essays in memory of Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Victoria University Press). In 2018, he published the history of Te Papa (Te Papa Press), and in 2019, Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship (coedited with Philipp Schorch, Manchester University Press).

Philipp Schorch is Professor of Museum Anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, where he leads an ERC-funded research project entitled “Indigeneities in the 21st Century.” He is also an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. Philipp’s research focuses on museums, material culture/history/theory, contemporary art and (post)colonial histories, the Pacific and Europe, collaborations with Indigenous artists/curators/scholars, and (post)socialist environments. He is lead coauthor of Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses (University of Hawai’i Press and Otago University Press, 2020), and coeditor of Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond (UCL Press, 2020) and Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship (Manchester University Press, 2019).

Nicholas Thomas’s books on cross-cultural encounters, colonialism, art and museums include Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 1991), which influentially contributed to a revival of material culture studies, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (Thames & Hudson, 1999) and Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (Penguin Press, 2003). His recent writings on museum histories and practice include The Return of Curiosity: What Museums Are Good for in the Twenty-first Century (Reaktion Books, 2016). He has been director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge since 2006, and has curated extensively, often in collaboration with contemporary artists. Over 2018–2019, he co-curated “Oceania” for the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Le musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris.