Elizabeth Edwards (historian)

Elizabeth Edwards, (born 1952) is a British visual and historical anthropologist.

Career

Edwards is Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University, Curator Emerita at Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and Honorary Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. In 2017 she was appointed the Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor at the V&A Research Institute, London. Her focus of research is the relationship between photography, history and anthropology, and includes investigations of photography and historical imagination, the social practices of photography, and the materiality of photographs.

Edwards was previously the Director of the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at De Montfort University, and was the Curator of Photographs at Pitt Rivers Museum and lecturer in visual anthropology at the University of Oxford, and professor at the University of the Arts London. She was featured as one of the major writers on photography of all time in 'Fifty Key Writers on Photography'.

In 2015 Edwards was elected to Fellow of the British Academy. She was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Visual Anthropology (American Anthropological Association) in 2014. Edwards is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and was its vice-president between 2009 and 2012. She is also a past Chair of the Museum Ethnographers Group.