Vicky Barnecutt
Vicky is an anthropologist and cultural historian whose research focuses on Papua New Guinea and cultural heritage collections from the ‘contact’ and colonial periods. She joined LSE in September 2025 as a Research Fellow on the three-year AHRC-funded project, Nambawan Piksa Bilong Papua New Guinea / Papua New Guinea’s First Films: Connecting Moving Images from 1904 to Descendant Communities Today, and works with the Project Lead, Prof. Michael Scott of the LSE Department of Anthropology.
Papua New Guinea’s First Films focuses on films produced in 1904 by the Daniels Ethnographical Expedition, which was funded and led by Major William Cooke Daniels and organised by Charles Seligmann, later of the LSE. The films depict around 20 traditional dances from six language areas within Papua New Guinea.
Vicky’s research concentrates on the history of the expedition, the films themselves, and related collections, including photographs, objects, and drawings. She works closely with the partner institutions in Papua New Guinea – the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies (IPNGS) and the National Film Institute (NFI) – to coordinate project activities. IPNGS will recruit and train researchers from the six language groups represented in the films to undertake the reconnection work. The films, together with a short documentary on the history of the expedition, will be shown to descendant communities, and their responses will be recorded. The NFI will make a documentary on this reconnection work.
Vicky also liaises with the British Film Institute, the British Museum, and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which are supporting the project in the UK, and works with the LSE’s Film and Audio Unit to produce the UK documentary.
Prior to joining the LSE, Vicky worked on True Echoes, a reconnection project at the British Library that investigated early wax cylinder audio recordings from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the Torres Strait Islands of Australia. She conducted historical and collections-based research on the expeditions and the colonial, missionary, and academic contexts that led to the creation of the recordings. For her doctoral thesis (University of Oxford, 2019) she undertook research on museum collections from New Ireland (Papua New Guinea) held in the UK, Australia, and Japan.
Vicky’s past and present projects reflect her sustained commitment to sharing archival materials collected by Europeans with the Pacific communities from which they came.