Nelia Dias

Visiting Scholar

Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, ISCTE/IUL, Lisbon, Portugal

Residence: February 1 – 17 and July 17 – August 17, 2013

Profile

Nélia Dias is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology (ISCTE-IUL Lisbon). She received an undergraduate degree in Ethnology from the University of Paris V Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary History from the EHESS (Paris).

She has been working in the history of 19th century French anthropology, most notably in the development of ethnographic and physical anthropology collections. Her first book, Le Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Anthropologie et Muséologie en France (Paris, CNRS, 1991), analyzed the role played by the practices of collecting in the emergence of 19th century French anthropology. Her second book, La Mesure des sens. Les anthropologues et le corps humain (Paris, Aubier, 2004) was dedicated to the epistemological and methodological procedures associated with the measurement of the senses in 19th century social sciences en general and in anthropology in particular.

At the moment she is working on two projects. In one of them, ‘Endangerment and its consequences’ (coordinated by Fernando Vidal, MPI) she examines the ways in which cultural notions of endangerment have permeated the constitution of various practices of documentation and preservation - archives, inventories, museum collections and databases – and how these practices are, at the same time, central in identifying some cultural entities as ‘endangered.’ In the other current project ‘Museums, Field, and Colony’ (coordinated by Tony Bennett and financed by the Australian Research Council 2011-2014), she analyses the changing relations between museum practices and the governance of metropolitan and colonial populations with a focus on the creation of satellite museums in former French Indochina throughout the 1930s.

She has held recently visiting appointments as Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University (2009) and as International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia (2013).