Johanna Zetterstrom Sharp

My research focuses on the different ways in which nations, institutions and individuals navigate ethical borderlands surrounding the ways in which colonialism is both remembered and structurally embedded in the present. Museums as spaces in which these memories and legacies are played out publicly has provided a central thread, with a focus on museum work in Sierra Leone and the UK. More recently, I have been exploring archives and collections relating to the end of the British Empire in Africa where my research has focused on the intersections between fieldwork, collecting, and the imagining of decolonial futures by British missionaries, academics, technocrats, and colonial and military officials.

I am part-time at Goldsmiths, and also work as a senior curator in the Horniman Museum and Garden's anthropology department. Since May 2020 I have also been the Chair of the Museum Ethnographers Group.