Howard Morphy

Howard Morphy is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts  at The Australian National University and Head of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research. As an anthropologist Professor Morphy has a fairly broad engagement with the discipline, with a strong focus on art, museums and visual anthropology.  In his career he has moved between museums and university departments and feels at home in collections and archives as much as in the field. He spent ten years at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, as curator and University Lecturer in Ethnology. In 1997 he returned to Australia eventually becoming Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Art. He has won a number of distinguished awards and fellowships, including the Malinowski Memorial Lecturer (1993) the Huxley Medallist (2013), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Council for Museum Anthropology (2017). He has written extensively on Australian Aboriginal art and religion with three monographs Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest (Aboriginal Studies Press (1984), Ancestral Connections (Chicago, 1991) and Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Berg, 2007). His most recent book is Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols (Routledge, 2020). His involvement in e-research and in the development of museum exhibitions reflects his determination to make humanities research as accessible as possible to wider publics and to close the distance between the research process and research outcomes.