E-Mail: mary.mbewe@khk.uni-saarland.de
Mary Mbewe obtained her PhD in history from the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). She served as the keeper of history at the Moto Moto Museum in Zambia from 2006 to 2016. Since 2016, she has been teaching history at Mulungushi University in Zambia. She has held several international fellowships, including the Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC (2013–2015), the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences doctoral fellowship (2017–2023), the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory doctoral research fellowship (CHR/UWC), and the Action for Restitution to Africa research fellowship (2021–2022). She received the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Award in 2018 and served as an international visiting graduate student at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto in 2019. Mary Mbewe has worked extensively on colonial collections, the history of anthropology, and missions in Africa. For the summer semester of 2025, she was a visiting lecturer in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, where she held seminars in critical museum and heritage studies, colonialism and missions, and archival methods in research on colonial collections.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Mbewe, Mary, and Constance Mulenga. “Revisiting Colonial Legacies: Unprovenanced Ethnological Collections at the Livingstone and Moto Moto Museums in Zambia”. Museum International (2026). https://doi.org/10.1080/13500775.2026.2683283.
- Mbewe, Mary. “Making the Bemba-Speaking People Ethnographic: The White Fathers and Missionary Ethnography in Northern Zambia”. Kronos 52, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2026/v52a7.
- Mbewe, Mary. “Remembering a Polish Refugee Camp in Mbala, Zambia: Community Initiatives, Excavations, Museum Exhibitions and Local Memories”. Memory Studies 18, no. 5 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251375344.
- Mbewe, Mary, and Abiti Nelson. “Handling Collections in the Museum Against Cultural Ethics”. In Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice, edited by Cara Krmpotich and Alice Stevenson. UCL Press, 2024. https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/240134.
- Mbewe, Mary. “Problematic Museum Collections in a Post-Colonial Context: The Case of the Moto Moto Museum Chisungu Collection”. Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften (2022): 61–77.
- Mbewe, Mary, and Carl Deußen, eds. “The Gender of Ethnographic Collecting”. Boasblogs Papers 3. boasblogs, 2022. https://boasblogs.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/bbp3_The-Gender-of-Ethnographic-Collecting_web.pdf.
CURE RESEARCH PROJECT