Chris Wingfield

Chris Wingfield works on the history of collections and collecting, with a particular focus on British missionaries and anthropologists during the long 19th century. An experienced curator who has worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Birmingham Museum & Arts Gallery, as well as the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge, he is interested in understanding the ways in which museums played a role in developing European understandings of other parts of the world.

His edited books include: Trophies, Relics and Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific (2015) and The Pasts and Presence of Art in South Africa: Technologies, Ontologies and Agents (2020), and his experimental digital monograph, Argonauts of the Eastern Atlantic (https://argonauts2022.net), was begun started in 2022.  Since 2024, he has also been Associate Editor of the Journal of the History of Collections.