Nicholas Thomas

Nicholas Jeremy Thomas, born in Australia in 1960, is an anthropologist and historian specializing in Pacific Islands, Oceanic art, colonial histories, and museology. He first visited the Pacific in 1984 for his PhD research on the Marquesas Islands and has authored influential books including Entangled Objects (1991), Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010, Wolfson History Prize winner), and Gauguin in Polynesia (2024). Since 2006, he has served as Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College.