Zoe Cormack is a name that resonates across the fields of anthropology, museum studies and African history. Through her rigorous research, she has brought new interpretative frames to how heritage is understood in contexts shaped by violence, colonial legacies and fractured memories. Her work consistently challenges conventional assumptions about preservation and display, asking uncomfortable questions of museums and institutions that hold collections from regions long affected by conflict and dispossession.
Early Life, Training and Intellectual Foundations
Little is publicly known about Zoe Cormack’s childhood, which suggests that her public identity has largely been shaped through her academic work rather than through personal memoirs or celebrity. What is clear, however, is that her trajectory has been firmly rooted in interdisciplinary inquiry: her grounding in anthropology, history and museum studies serves as the backbone of her research style.
Cormack’s early training gave her tools to navigate across disciplinary boundaries. She combines ethnographic sensibility with archival investigation and curatorial awareness. Her method is not purely theoretical: she actively engages with physical collections, sometimes bringing them into conversation with field communities whose heritage they originated from. This hands-on orientation is crucial to the force of her critique of museum practices and colonial legacies.
In many ways, Zoe Cormack belongs to a generation of scholars who insist that “things matter” — that objects, artefacts and material traces cannot be neatly compartmentalised into exotic artefact boxes, but are embedded in social worlds with political, emotional and symbolic significance.
Focus Area: South Sudan, Conflict and Heritage
Cormack’s primary area of research is South Sudan, a country whose violent formation and fragile institutions make questions of memory and heritage particularly acute. She has devoted years of fieldwork in regions like Warrap and Gogrial, working with local communities to understand how people live with ruins, memorials, artefacts and contested pasts.
The Politics of Commemoration
In her writing on South Sudanese commemoration, she emphasises the tensions between visibility and erasure. Monuments intended to memorialise rebels or victims sometimes remain unfinished, decaying or contested. Such memorials become sites of symbolic struggle — whose memory is represented, whose is marginalised, and how the state or elites might try to control that symbolism.
Cormack argues that memorials in such settings are rarely neutral. They are often entangled in current local politics, resource constraints and competing claims over land and authority. Thus, what appears to be a public monument is deeply local in its conflicts over meaning and power.
Heritage, Identity and Divided Memory
For many people in South Sudan, heritage is not a simple legacy to be preserved. It is contested, fragile and sometimes painful. Some artefacts were removed in colonial eras or during conflict; others are still held in local settings but threatened by neglect, looting or environmental damage. In that sense, heritage is as much about futures as pasts. Cormack attends to how communities negotiate the presence of objects in local memory, whether they incorporate them into new rituals, re-interpret their significance or leave them in limbo.
Major Works and Contributions
Pieces of a Nation: South Sudanese Heritage and Museum Collections (Editor, 2021)
One of her most substantial editorial projects is Pieces of a Nation. In this volume, she gathers essays that explore how dispersed collections—whether in European museums, national institutions or local storage rooms—relate to the evolving national identity of South Sudan. The book questions the conventional dichotomy between “home” and “abroad” collections, urging readers to see museum collections as actively shaping national imagination, rather than passively preserving relics.
Through the essays she curates, Cormack shows how trustees, curators, communities and state actors negotiate competing claims over heritage, sometimes with tension, sometimes with hope. The volume emphasises pathways for reparation, collaboration, and decolonial curatorial practice without glossing over the structural inequalities that afflict international museum networks.
The Spectacle of Death: Visibility and Concealment at an Unfinished Memorial in South Sudan (2017)
In this article, Cormack examines a single unfinished memorial in South Sudan to ask how the corporeal visibility of death is mediated in a society still emerging from violence. She suggests that partial memorials—those left incomplete—carry their own aesthetic and symbolic force. They gesture to absence, to projects left unfinished, to ruptures in memory and resources.
The contrast between visibility and concealment—who is seen, who is hidden, who is forgotten—is central to her analysis. The memorial’s incomplete state becomes a metaphor for how societies recover (or fail to recover) from violence: memory is never cleanly archived, but is negotiated in fragments and silences.
Restitution, Provenance and Colonial Collections
Cormack has also contributed significantly to debates about the ethics of holding artefacts brought from African contexts during colonial periods—especially in British and European museums. She is critical of institutions that present colonial acquisitions as harmless ethnographic objects divorced from their histories of dispossession.
Her work calls for deeper inquiry into provenance, transparent discourse on restitution, and the possibility of co-curatorial practices that include voices from source communities. For her, simply returning objects is not enough; rather, the process must be accompanied by relational practices that address power asymmetries and voice.
A recent example of her engagement is her focus on the British Museum and its ties to the Abyssinian Campaign of 1867–68. She interrogates how contested objects from that campaign remain in British institutional holdings, asking whether the museum can meaningfully reconcile the violence embedded in those objects’ trajectories.
Methodological Approach and Philosophical Stance
What marks Cormack’s work is how she refuses a strict boundary between field and museum. She often brings her field insights to bear on how collections are treated in institutional settings, and she invites museum professionals to think in more dynamic, relational terms. Her approach is characterised by three features:
- Relational thinking: She treats objects and communities as co-constitutive, rather than objectifying heritage as inert matter.
- Critical historicisation: She sees every artefact as embedded in colonial, violent and trade networks; thus, understanding context is not optional, but essential.
- Engagement with uncertainty: She does not pretend that heritage can be fully recovered or healed; instead, she attends to gaps, absences and uncertainties as part of the story.
This stance allows her to avoid naïve romanticism about repatriation or revival of tradition. Instead, she asks: If communities reclaim objects or manage their heritage, on what terms, under what constraints, and with what lingering inequalities?
Impact, Reception and Influence
Zoe Cormack has become an influential voice in several fields—African studies, museum practice, memory studies and heritage debates.
Her work is increasingly cited in discussions of decolonising museums, especially those dealing with African collections. Her insistence on relational curatorship is shaping how institutions think about partnerships with source communities.
In South Sudanese academic and cultural circles, her approach has encouraged conversations about how to integrate local perspectives and colonial legacies when building national museums or heritage policies.
Through her scholarly output, she has contributed to shifting the research agenda from merely cataloguing artefacts to interrogating how objects move, how communities engage with them, and how memory is actively constructed.
Her influence is not limited to academia: curators, heritage institutions and cultural ministries interested in more equitable practices often look to her work for guidance on frameworks of restitution, co-curation and critical heritage.
Challenges, Critiques and Open Questions
No scholar is without debate, and Cormack’s work is no exception. Some of the challenges or critiques her approach faces include:
Practical constraints on co-curatorship: Museums often operate under funding, legal and institutional restraints that make full collaboration with source communities difficult. The ideal of co-curatorship can clash with institutional inertia, donor expectations or political pressure.
Power differentials among stakeholders: Even when communities are included, the process can replicate inequalities—some voices may dominate over marginalized ones. Navigating local politics is not straightforward, especially when communities themselves contend with internal conflict or uncertainty about heritage claims.
Limits of repatriation alone: Critics may argue that returning objects without structural reform risks symbolic gestures rather than substantive change. Cormack acknowledges this; thus, her proposals often entail not just return but relational repair, shared authority, and ongoing conversation.
Risk of over-interpretation: Reading absence, fragments or unfinished memorials can sometimes flirt with speculative analysis. The tension between grounded empirical detail and theoretical ambition is always present.
Fragile field contexts: Conducting fieldwork in postconflict zones like parts of South Sudan carries risks—security, access, resource constraints, and the shifting political landscape all make sustained work difficult.
These are not shortcomings of her ambition, but real tensions faced by anyone attempting heritage research in volatile contexts. The value of her work is partly in how she acknowledges these difficulties rather than sidestepping them.
Future Directions and Possibilities
Looking ahead, there are several strands in which Zoe Cormack’s work may grow or inspire further inquiry.
Digitally mediated restitution and repatriation: As digital tools become more integral, Cormack’s relational approach could extend into how communities virtually reclaim and remix objects without physically relocating them. The question of shared digital sovereignty opens a rich space.
Comparative heritage across conflict zones: While South Sudan is her anchoring case, her approaches could be applied comparatively—say, to heritage in Myanmar, Central African Republic or other contested contexts, examining how war, displacement and colonial collecting intersect.
Decolonial museum practice education: She may more deeply engage in training curators, museum professionals and cultural policymakers, translating her theoretical insight into institutional reform and new curricula.
Youth, memory and future imaginaries: Working with younger generations in conflict-affected regions to envision how memory might evolve, how future heritage might be shaped, and how archives might adapt to instability.
Policy and governance of heritage: She might further intervene in state policies on cultural heritage, contributing to legislation around museums, restitution, museum-community partnerships and heritage protection in fragile states.
Her method and lens are well placed to continue challenging the status quo. As debates about returning artefacts, the role of museums in postcolonial contexts and the politics of memory intensify, voices like hers will likely be central.
Why Zoe Cormack Matters Today
In a world where museums are increasingly under scrutiny for how they acquired and display non-European artefacts, Zoe Cormack offers an approach grounded in humility, critical history and relational ethics. She insists that heritage is never a neutral terrain but one deeply entangled with power, violence and memory.
Her focus on South Sudan — a country navigating identity, fragmentation and renewal — reminds us that heritage work is not about passive preservation, but active negotiation. What artefacts remain, what is returned, how memory is spoken or silenced — all these questions are part of building futures, not merely archiving pasts.
For scholars, curators, heritage activists or anyone interested in how objects connect to people, Zoe Cormack’s voice is one that calls us to reflect, contest and rebuild the ways we think about memory, museums and material culture. Her journey continues, and the conversations she leads are becoming indispensable for many seeking more just and accountable cultural worlds.
Conclusion
Zoe Cormack stands out as a leading scholar who blends historical insight, ethnographic sensitivity and critical engagement with the ethics of collecting and remembering. Her work in South Sudan and in European museum contexts demonstrates how heritage is not merely about the past but also about shaping more equitable futures. Through her writings and collaborative projects, she challenges us to question the legacies of colonialism and to imagine museum practices that are more inclusive, transparent and just.
