Dr Christopher Morton

Dr Christopher Morton is Head of Curatorial, Research and Teaching a the Pitt Rivers Museum. His research centres on the overlapping histories of photography, anthropology and museum collections. He is interested in how the visual technologies of the past influenced the way that other cultures and societies were understood within European science, and how these legacies continue in the contemporary world. He has conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in southern Africa, and has research interests in various other African countries, such as Kenya, South Sudan and Nigeria. His latest publication is a monograph on the fieldwork and photography of renowned British social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard (The Anthropological Lens: Rethinking E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Oxford University Press 2019). Another strand of his research is on the recirculation of archival photographs in the places they were taken, and the local perceptions and meanings that emerge from this process. As part of this research, he studies the reception and resocialisation of historical photographs in Nyanza (Western Kenya), as well as South Australia and Western Australia.

You can learn more about Dr Morton's work here on the Pitt Rivers Museum website.