Main Speakers

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The Speakers

• Alissandra Cummins
  
  

  ALISSANDRA CUMMINS is Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours in the History of Art from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and a Masters of Arts in Museum Studies from Leicester University,UK. A recognized authority on Caribbean heritage, museum development and art, she was elected a Fellow of the Museums Association (U.K), a first for the Caribbean. She is a lecturer in Heritage Studies with the University of the West Indies. She currently serves on the editorial committee of the International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship.

  Ms. Cummins was instrumental in the establishment of the Museums Association of the Caribbean (MAC), becoming its Founding President in 1989, and was equally active as first Board member and then as President of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology ( IACA). Miss Cummins served between 1998-2004 as Chairperson of the Advisory Committee of ICOM (International Council of Museums), following which she was elected as its President in 2004 and 2007. She is still serving in this capacity having been re-elected In August 2007. She has also served as Chairperson of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Country of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation (ICPRCP) from 2003-2005, and more recently (2007) was appointed as President of the International Advisory Committee of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme. Ms. Cummins was recently selected to head Barbados' delegation to the World Heritage Committee.

  In 1999 Ms. Cummins was appointed Special Envoy for Cultural Heritage by the Government of Barbados, in which capacity she advises on both technical issues and policy development, and represents the nation at the regional and international levels. In 2005, Alissandra Cummins was awarded Barbados’ Gold Crown of Merit in recognition of her services to heritage and museum development. In 2006, she was recognized by UNESCO as one of “sixty eminent women who, in different parts of the world, in different positions and in different moments across the history of the Organization have made, and in many ways are still making, significant contributions to the ideals and action of the Organization, be it in education, culture, science or communication”.

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• Amareswar Galla
  
  

  Born and educated in both south and north India, including Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Professor Galla provides strategic cultural leadership in Australia and the Asia Pacific Region as the Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. (http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au) Until recently he was the Professor and Director of Sustainable Heritage Development, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University in Canberra. He was also a regular visitor at the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, working on the implementation of Museums and Cultural Diversity Promotion in the Netherlands; Guest Curator of International Projects with the Vietnam National Department of Cultural Heritage; and Founding Convener of the Pacific Asia Observatory for Cultural Diversity in Sustainable Heritage Development in partnership with several bodies including UNESCO. (www.pacificasiaobservatory.org) He is the first Australian elected as the President of the Asia Pacific Executive Board (1998-2004) - Chairperson of the Cross Cultural Task Force (2005-2011) - and until recently Vice President of the International Executive Council (2004-2007) - of the International Council of Museums, Paris. He is a Trustee of the Pacific Islands Museums Association.

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• Kevin Gover
  
  

  Kevin Gover is the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian as of December 2, 2007. He is a former professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in Tempe, an affiliate professor in its American Indian Studies Program and co-executive director of the university’s American Indian Policy Institute. Gover joined the faculty at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in 2003 and serves on the faculty of the university’s prestigious Indian Legal Program. He has taught courses in federal Indian law, administrative law and statutory interpretation, as well as an undergraduate course in American Indian policy.

  Gover grew up in Oklahoma and is a member of the Pawnee and Comanche tribes. He received his bachelor’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University and his law degree from the University of New Mexico. He was awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree from Princeton University in 2001.

  A presidential appointee, Gover served as the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1997 to 2000. He was responsible for policy and operational oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the agency responsible for the federal government’s relations with Indian tribes. He oversaw programs in Indian education, law enforcement, social services, treaty rights and trust asset management. He currently serves as associate judge on the Tonto Apache Tribal Court of Appeals and the San Carlos Apache Tribal Court of Appeals. He is a member of the board of trustees of the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust in Flagstaff, Ariz., and of the board of directors of the nonprofit Futures for Children in Albuquerque.

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• David Throsby
  
  

  David Throsby is a Professor of Economics at Macquarie University, Sydney. Professor Throsby's research interests include the economics of the arts and culture, the economics of education, and the theory of nonmarket goods. He is currently working on economic aspects of cultural policy, sustainability in cultural systems, and theories of economic and cultural value.

  Key appointments in the last ten years: 1990-91 Chair, Prime Minister's Working Groups on Ecologically Sustainable Development (Tourism, Transport, and Energy Use Groups); Board Member: Museum of Contemporary Art (to 1997); Copyright Agency Limited (to 1999) and Viscopy (to 1999); Chair, National Association for the Visual Arts (to 1998); President, Association for Cultural Economics International (1996-98); Adviser, UNESCO World Culture Reports (1996-2000).

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• Marcus Wood
  
  

  Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist and film maker, and also a professor in the English department of the University of Sussex. He has been writing books and making art about the memory of Atlantic slavery for the last twenty years. His publications include Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1765 ?1865 (2000) and Slavery Empathy and Pornography (2003). During the next three years Marcus, as a senior Leverhulme fellow, will be writing a comparative analysis of Brazilian and North American slavery propagandas. This book will have a particular emphasis on Diasporic memory and museum culture.

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