Dr Giovanna Vitelli
Head of Collections and Curatorial
Short Biography
Dr Giovanna Vitelli joined The Hunterian in 2019 from the University of Oxford, having been Director of the Ashmolean Museum’s internationally recognised University Engagement Programme.
Dr Vitelli is a member of The Hunterian Leadership Team and Secretary of The Hunterian Academic Advisory Board. She works closely with the curatorial and collections management teams in making the collections more transparent in their histories, and more accessible to academic colleagues and other stakeholders for partnerships in research, teaching, narrative building and provenance research.
Her priorities are to foster wider and deeper cross-disciplinary engagement with the collections, encouraging long-term partnerships with a range of communities and a focus on topics such as Empire, histories of collecting, climate change and the decolonising of research practice.
Dr Vitelli, an archaeologist and anthropologist of colonial settings, uses her fieldwork, collections and excavation experience for new research in the field of museum ethnography and collections-based method and theory. She has authored a number of recent publications on museum praxis and object study, and regularly lectures and presents on these topics at international meetings. She is Vice-Chair of ICOM-UMAC (University Museums and Collections).