Dr Gareth Knapman is a Research Fellow with the Return, Reconcile, Renew repatriation network at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, Australian National University. He previously served as a Research Associate on the ARC Discovery Project Profit and Loss: The Commercial Trade in Indigenous Human Remains. Prior to entering academia, Dr Knapman worked as a curator and repatriation officer in the Indigenous Cultures Department at Museum Victoria. He has published extensively on museum collections and collecting practices, and has made significant contributions to Australian historical scholarship. His recent work on repatriation critically interrogates the assumed legality of colonial plunder by examining the administrative regulations and bureaucratic processes of colonial regimes.

Dr Knapman is a leading authority on nineteenth-century British colonialism in Southeast Asia. His book, Race and British Colonialism in Southeast Asia (2017), offered a groundbreaking reinterpretation of race and empire in the region. He is currently writing a book on sovereignty and property in the British colonial world, developing a transcolonial narrative that connects British India with colonial settlements in Southeast Asia and Australia. Central to this research is his argument that modern concepts of sovereignty were shaped through British interpretations of feudalism.

PhD (RMIT)

Repatriation and Restituion of colonial collections

Eighteenth and Nineteenth century Colonial thought in Asia and Australasia

Racial thought

History of Anthropology

History of Anzac Day

War and memory