Vibe Nielsen

Short presentation

Vibe Nielsen is a social anthropologist with a research interest in issues related to the decolonisation of museums, botanical gardens and public places. In affiliation with the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Dr Nielsen is the PI of the Ny Carlsberg Foundation-supported postdoctoral research project Passion or Politics? The Art Collection of Carl Jacobsen in a socio-economic and cultural-political context 1878-1914.

Since completing her three-year postdoctoral research project Decolonising Museums: Changing Curatorial Practices at the Pitt Rivers and Quai Branly (2021-24), supported by the Carlsberg Foundation and hosted by the Pitt Rivers Museum and Linacre College at the University of Oxford, Dr Nielsen has been affiliated as Associate Researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum. She has recently been awarded a two-year Research Fellowship at Linacre College, University of Oxford, in continuation of her three years as Junior Research Fellow.

Dr Nielsen has worked in museums, universities and cultural organisations in Denmark (the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, the National Museum of Denmark and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen), France (the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris), Italy (Accademia di Danimarca in Rome) and the United Kingdom (Pitt Rivers Museum and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford). Her ethnographic fieldwork experience covers museums and botanical gardens in Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Her most recent publications include 'The Colonial Roots of Botany – Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew' (2023), a single-authored journal article in Museum Management and Curatorship, and the De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places (2023) anthology, in which her chapter 'Diversifying Public Commemoration in Cape Town and Copenhagen' appears. A French version of the anthology called Dé-commémoration : Quand le monde déboulonne des statues et renomme des rue (2023) has been published by Éditions Fayard. In February 2023, Dr Nielsen published the co-authored anthology Global Art in Local Art Worlds: Changing Hierarchies of Value with Routledge. The volume includes her chapter 'Ambivalent Art at the Tip of a Continent: The Zeitz MOCAA and its quest for global recognition' (2023), which appears alongside contributions about museums and art institutions in Indigenous Australia, Brazil, China, India and Japan.

Vibe Nielsen wrote her PhD thesis Demanding Recognition: Curatorial Challenges in the Exhibition of Art from South Africa (2019) as part of the Global Europe: Constituting Europe from the Outside In through Artefacts research project at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, where she remained affiliated as a postdoctoral researcher until August 2020 and as visiting scholar until February 2022. Through anthropological fieldwork, as well as historical and museological methods, her PhD thesis examines contemporary curatorial practices in South African museums and art galleries. She continued working on these issues in her postdoctoral affiliation with the department (2019-20) and published her analysis of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in her sigle-authored article 'In the absence of Rhodes: decolonizing South African universities' in the Ethnic and Racial Studies journal in 2021.

Before her appointment as PhD Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Dr Nielsen worked at the National Museum of Denmark as Curator of Public Programmes. She received her MA degree in Museum Studies at University College London in 2012 and her MA degree in Modern Culture at the University of Copenhagen in 2015. In the final thesis of her MA in Museum Studies she explored the dissemination of the British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade in museums in London and Liverpool. This was an aspect she researched further in the final thesis of her MA in Modern Culture, where she analysed how Danish and British museums in different ways are dealing with their countries’ colonial pasts.

CV

Former Employment

Carlsberg Foundation Visiting Fellow at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Linacre College, University of Oxford 2021-24

Postdoctoral Reseracher at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen 2019-20

PhD Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen 2016-19

Curator of Public Programmes, The National Museum of Denmark 2015-16

Education

PhD in Anthropology, University of Copenhagen 2019

MA in Modern Culture, University of Copenhagen 2015

MA in Museum Studies, University College London 2012

BA in European Ethnology, University of Copenhagen 2010