 | Professor John Mack
Professor of World Art Studies, University of East Anglia (S3) The anthropology and history of art and material culture, especially in equatorial Africa and the western Indian Ocean; comparative work on themes such as memory, miniaturisation, and the experience of the environment
John Mack is a social anthropologist who works in the field of art and visual culture with a specific focus on sub-Saharan Africa and the western Indian Ocean. After degrees at the University of Sussex and at Oxford he began working at the Museum of Mankind (then part of the British Museum) in 1976 and eventually became Keeper of it in 1991. With the relocation of the British Library to the new building in St. Pancras he oversaw the reintegration of his department into the British Museum and was made Senior Keeper for 6 years. During his time there he undertook fieldwork for the Museum in Southern Sudan and northern Kenya and Madagascar, much of which informed the numerous exhibitions and publications for which he has been responsible. He oversaw the installation of several new Galleries at the British Museum, notably the Sainsbury African Galleries opened in 2001. He is still closely involved with the research programmes of the British Museum and in particular with the work being done in Africa. In 2004 he moved to the newly-created Professorship in World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, where he is now Head of School. He is thought to be the first anthropologist to be appointed to the professorship of a department formerly led by art historians. His recent work reflects this wider brief with books on The Museum of the Mind (which accompanied a British Museum exhibition looking at the relationship of art to the creation of memory in 2003) and on The Art of Small Things (2007). He is currently completing a book entitled Inhabiting the Sea. Mack is also President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, a British Academy-sponsored School based in Nairobi but promoting humanities and social science research across the whole of the eastern African region. Mack sees his election to a fellowship of the British Academy as an opportunity to contribute to the international profile of Academy and, in his own immediate disciplinary area, to promote comparative research on visual expression in a global context. |
