Prof. 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). He was Visiting Student in Anthropology through the University of California at Berkeley Extension Program at UC Berkeley (1999-2000) and, on Fulbright and additional grants and bursaries, at the University of Chicago (2001-2002). He has carried out extensive long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Vanuatu, Southwest Pacific, from 2006 onwards. In 2013-14, he was 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 and film in Vanuatu and Zanzibar and he was a long-term member of the Vlir-Uos Project 'Governance, Gender, Entrepreneurship, and ICT in Tanzania' (2018-2022) in cooperation with Mzumbe University, Morogoro. At GUM (Ghent University Museum), Prof. DeBlock is Curator of Ethnographic Collections. 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 the DRCongo, as well as contemporary grassroots activism, artistic practice and artivism.
