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 and is the current Research Associate on Police Collecting of Ancestral Remains and Cultural Property, 1825-1930. Prior to entering academia, 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.

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. In 2023 he published in Art Antiquity and Law with Sadiah Boonstra ‘Plunder and Prize in 1812 Java: The Legality and Consequences for Research and Restitution of the Raffles Collections’, which is the first analysis of the legality of East India Company plunder in Java. 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.

BA., Hons (Monash), PhD. (RMIT), PhD. (ANU)

Eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial history 

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 and Australia Day

War and memory