Current PhD Students
Deborah Dainese
Deborah’s research consists in writing the biography of the Congolese modern artist Gabriel Matshitolo Mwata Sola, who lived and worked in the present-day Bandundu region in the mid-Twentieth century. She is particularly interested in Congolese colonial and post-colonial art, archives, and missionary collections.
Trained as an Art Historian, Deborah has gained valuable knowledge and experience in curatorial museum practice through her position as assistant curator, art cataloguer, and visitor assistant at the Diocesan Museum of Vicenza (Italy). In 2023, she worked as assistant curator for Africa, with special emphasis on provenance research, at the Ethnological Museum “Anima Mundi”, Vatican Museums. She is currently working on projects focusing on the constitution of early collections in Italy and the Vatican.
Since completing her MA at SRU (2019), Deborah has been a member of the Centre for African Art and Archaeology. She is also the Centre’s poster designer.
Deborah is also a freelance illustrator working with mixed media techniques. Examples of her work can be found at deborah_dainese.
Clémentine Debrosse
At the intersection of art history and museum studies, Clémentine’s research focusses on the exhibition in European institutions of the works of contemporary artists whose practice integrates colonial archival materials. Her research is funded by CHASE, AHRC.
Clémentine has gained valuable knowledge and experience in curatorial museum practice both through her internships at international institutions such as the National Museum of Australia and the National Gallery of Australia, as well as through her time at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain as assistant curator.
Clémentine is co-founder of Oceania focused blog and association CASOAR. In 2022, CASOAR was recipient of the young researchers’ scholarship at the French National Institute for History of Art.
Alba Ferrándiz Gaudens
Alba’s research looks at the circulation, agency and display of CHamoru objects (from the Mariana Islands) in Spanish museums. Her thesis also focuses on the history of CHamoru collections in Spanish museums, the relationships between CHamoru and Spanish institutions and cultural revitalisation of ancestral practices in the Mariana Islands.
Alba is Events Officer at the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) since 2022. MEG is a UK-based network for people that work with, in or around museums of ethnography. She has gained valuable experience working as Assistant Curator for Pacific collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Harvard University.
Garance Nyssen
Garance is a French PhD student funded by AHRC-CHASE. She holds a BA and a MA in art history and museum studies from the École du Louvre (Paris) and a BA and a MA in anthropology from the Université Paris Nanterre. Garance is also the co-founder of CASOAR, a blog and association dedicated to the history, art and anthropology of Oceania.
Garance’s research focuses on the return of seventeen ancient Polynesian objects to the Te Fare Iamanaha – Musée de Tahiti et des Îles (Tahiti, French Polynesia). She looks at the process of these returns and their aftermath, specifically for two of the objects: a presumed fragment of maro ‘ura and a maro kura. Rooted in an ethnographic methodology, Garance and her collaborators in Tahiti, Ra‘iātea and Ganā islands aim at understanding the materiality of the objects, the cosmological contexts which framed their existence and use two centuries ago, the reasons why they left their islands at the beginning of the 19th century, and also what future lies ahead for them.