Cresa Leonard Pugh

Cresa is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University and is currently writing her dissertation on the politics of cultural theft. Her project examines artifacts looted from the Benin Kingdom (modern day Nigeria) by British forces in the 19^th century that are now housed in Western museums and asks how debates about these objects may help us understand and grapple with the social and political legacies of imperialism. Using archival and ethnographic data collected across three continents, she interrogates questions of ownership, appropriation and violence through the medium of 16^th century brass and ivory artifacts whose displacement continues to serve as an archival record of a dispossessed cultural body. Her research fundamentally examines narratives of restitution and repair and the ways in which healing and the reclamation of memory and communal historiographies materialize in the postcolonial context. Cresa’s work sits at the intersection of transnational historical and cultural sociology, postcolonial studies, critical archaeology, and museum and heritage studies.