Thupten Kelsang is the AHRC Early Career Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London and the lead for the AHRC-funded Reanimating Tibetan Heritage project. He is a museum anthropologist by training, with a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford. At Oxford, he was awarded the Clarendon Fellowship and has also received multiple academic grants, including Wenner-Gren’s Engaged Research Grant and the ACLS Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. He curated the Tibetan Objects in Transition display in the Pitt Rivers Museum and has been consulted by the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the British Library, and the Horniman. Before pursuing museum research and practice, he was a community organiser and independent researcher, speaking and advising on Tibetan heritage at platforms such as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Prince Claus Fund.
Debates around the ownership of cultural heritage and decolonizing museums have become increasingly visible and polarizing in the public domain, leading to attempts to redefine the term “museum” itself.1The International Council of Museums (ICOM) Extraordinary General Assembly approved the following new definition of “museum” at the 26th ICOM General Conference held in Prague in August…
