Dr Christopher Morton

Research

My research centres on the overlapping histories of photography, anthropology and museum collections. I am interested in how the visual technologies of the past influenced the way that other cultures and societies were understood within European science, and how these legacies continue in the contemporary world. I have conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in southern Africa, and have research interests in various other African countries, such as Kenya, South Sudan and Nigeria. I have been researching and writing on the South Sudan fieldwork and photography of E.E. Evans-Pritchard since 2003, and am currently working on the manuscript for a monograph on this subject for Oxford University Press. Another strand of my research is on the recirculation of archival photographs in the places they were taken, and the local perceptions and meanings that emerge from this process. As part of this research, I have studied the reception and resocialisation of historical photographs in Nyanza (Western Kenya), as well as South Australia and Western Australia.