Dr. Hugo DeBlock holds an MA in Art History (UGent 1999), an advanced MA in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (U of East Anglia 2006), and a Ph.D. in Anthropology (U of Melbourne 2013). In addition, he was visiting student in anthropology through the University of California at Berkeley Extension Program at UC Berkeley (1999-2000) and, on Fulbright and a range of other grants, at the University of Chicago (2001-2002). He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Vanuatu, Southwest Pacific, in 2006, 2008, and from 2009 onwards. In 2013-14 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the Value and Equivalence Graduiertenkolleg, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, on a project entitled "The Future of Indigenous Museums in the Pacific". His most recent research focusses on visual anthropology, representation, and film in Vanuatu, Tanzania, and Zanzibar, and he is a member of the Vlir Uos Project entitled 'Governance, Gender, Entrepreneurship, and ICT in Tanzania' in cooperation with Mzumbe University, Morogoro. His areas of research include material culture and art from Africa and the Pacific, anthropology of tourism, museum anthropology, colonialism, postcolonialism, decolonisation and restitution, with main research foci on Vanuatu, Tanzania, and DRC, as well as contemporary grassroots activism, artistic practice, and artivism.
