Vanessa Smith teaches at the University of Sydney, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of English, and publishes across the disciplines of literary studies, history, and anthropology. She began visiting the Pacific islands in 1994 while researching the early impact of print culture in Samoa and Tonga. More recently she has focused on Tahiti and the Hawaiian and Marquesas Islands while exploring the politics of friendship in contacts between Oceanians and Europeans. Her interest in the Bounty stories has morphed from a focus on beachcomber narrative, via an excursus on breadfruit, to an exploration of the colonialist politics of the Pitcairn island settlement, and analysis of the shifting allegiances manifest in the mutiny and the mutineers’ trial. Her most recent book is Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (2010).
Nicholas Thomas is director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He first visited the Pacific in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands. He has since written extensively on art, empire, and related themes, and curated exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, many in collaboration with contemporary artists. His early book, Entangled Objects, influentially contributed to a revival of material culture studies. He went on to publish, among other works, Oceanic Art in the Thames and Hudson World of Art series and Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire, which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.
