Johanna Zetterström-Sharp

I am Associate Professor in Heritage and Museum Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Prior to this, I was Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in South London, where I worked for over a decade (2012-2022), and Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths (2019-2022).

My interdisciplinary research explores British colonial pasts and presents. I am particularly interested in how public moralities play out in the navigation of colonial legacies and inheritances, and in the way different futures are imagined and planned for. My AHRC-funded PhD research (UCL, 2009-2012) explored this in relation to faith, development and heritage making in Sierra Leone.

I have a deep interest in disciplinary knowledge production, and how issues of race, entitlement and inequality become structurally embedded through the establishment of professional expertise and practice across a range of fields. My forthcoming book with UCL Press explores this in relation to the disciplinary and ethical crises faced by museum practitioners working with colonial collections in the UK between the 1970s and early 1990s, and the legacies of this today. My British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2016-2019) looked at collections compiled by academic researchers and policy makers employed in the lead-up to widespread political independence, including anthropologists and agricultural scientists.

I am currently Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded project Milking It! Colonialism, Heritage and Everyday Engagement with Dairy which looks at some of these questions through the lens of milk and dairy. I am also recent recipient of a Leverhulme Research Grant called Collections, Conviviality, Culture Wars which traces professional languages and practices relating to post-colonial redress by museum professionals, from 1997 to the Present.