Enzo Hamel

Enzo Hamel is a PhD student at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK). His current PhD project is entitled “Recovering Indigenous Agencies in Ethnographic Visual Archives: Activating Gregory Bateson, Reo Fortune and Margaret Mead’s photographs” and will focus on visual archives deriving from the fieldwork of three anthropologists in Papua New Guinea between 1929 and 1938. He graduated from the Ecole du Louvre (Paris) with a degree in art history and from the Université Paris-Nanterre with a degree in social anthropology. He holds a MA in Museum Studies from the Ecole du Louvre and a MA in the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia. He is a co-founder and writer for the blog and association CASOAR which was the recipient of the 2022 young researchers INHALab residency at the French National Institute for Art History in Paris. His work focuses on the intertwined colonial history of social anthropology and photography. Originally trained in material culture studies and museum studies, current debates about decolonising museums and archives as well as repatriation claims are of great interest to him.