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 examines the practice of contemporary Indigenous, diasporic and Global South artists, and argues that archival art is a method for the dissemination of colonial archives outside of their storage spaces (analogue or digital) by means of their exhibition, offering new meanings to the archives and chances of encounter and experience by the public. She completed her thesis "Archival Present: Contemporary Artists At Work With Colonial Archives in European Exhibition Spaces" in May 2026. Her research was funded by CHASE-AHRC.
Her work has been published across journals and blogs and in the edited volumes: Towards an Inclusive Museology in Material Culture Museums: Conceptual Art as a Method (2026, Routledge) and Hidden Stories, Entangled Spaces: Contested Island Heritage and Contemporary Art Curation (2026, ICOFOM).
She 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.
Enzo Hamel
Enzo is a PhD student funded by an AHRC-CHASE and Stuart Hall Foundation scholarship. He graduated from Art History and Museum Studies at the École du Louvre and from Anthropology at the Université Paris-Nanterre.
His doctoral research develops a collaborative analysis of Gregory Bateson’s archives with contemporary latmul communities (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea). Focusing on photography and fieldnotes, he explores the potential of such collections for understanding local agencies, cosmologies, and epistemologies, as well as the multiple affordances of archives for the present and future of latmul communities.
His work draws from multiple research experiences in museums and archives across the UK, the US, France, and the Netherlands. For his PhD, he has carried out archival research at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge, UK) and the Library of Congress (Washington, DC). Since 2023, he has conducted ethnographic research in the latmul region. In 2023, he was awarded a UK Research and Innovation Fellowship to examine the Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center. His work appears in Pacific Art Journal, Etnofoor, and The Australian Journal of Anthropology.
Enzo is co-founder of CASOAR, a blog and association focusing on the arts and cultures of Oceania, which received the Young Researchers’ Scholarship from the French National Institute for Art History.
Anahí Luna
Anahí is an Anthropologist and Art Historian specialising in the indigenous arts of the Pacific and the Americas. In her work, she explores how indigenous art embodies a complex system of knowledge which deserves to be understood and respected. Her PhD research focuses on Female tattooing in the Central Province of Papua New Guinea, where she has done collaborative fieldwork among the Roro and Mekeo communities, documenting their artistic practices and women’s lives.
She is also a specialist in the work of the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957). Since 2022, she has been authenticating Covarrubias’ art, working closely with art galleries, private collectors and auction houses. In 2025, she co-curated the exhibition “Miguel Covarrubias. A look without borders” (Palacio de Iturbide, Mexico City), which attracted more than 250,000 visitors.
Examples of her publications can be found at https://eastanglia.academia.edu/AnahíLuna
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.