Karen Jacobs

Karen Jacobs‘ research focuses broadly on the arts from Oceania and specifically on museum and visual anthropology and related debates, aspects of climate change and ocean culture, missionary heritage, body adornment, youth culture, and contemporary Pacific art. Her interdisciplinary research is in collaboration with museums, Indigenous communities and contemporary artists. Studying museum and archival collections, their collecting processes, their classification and status in the museum, and contemporary community, institutional and artistic responses to them is key to her work. Most of her research was conducted in the framework of funded international research projects and has resulted in a variety of exhibitions and publications.

Book projects include Collecting Kamoro (2012), Trophies, Relics and Curios? (2015) and This is not a Grass Skirt (2019). Exhibition projects include Papua Lives (Leiden National Museum of World Cultures, 2003), Pacific Encounters (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2006; Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, 2008), Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2016-17; LACMA, 2019-21) and iSausauvou: Arts/Transmission/Resilience (Fiji Museum, 2022). She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, a member of the editorial board of the Journal de la Société des Océanistes as well as the Pacific Arts journal. She is a regular consultant for museums, heritage instutions and publishers.