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Dr Freda Nkirote M’Mbogori is a senior Kenyan archaeologist with considerable experience in leadership roles and with an impressive international profile. She has spent the last seven years as Deputy Director and then Country Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa where she has been a close collaborator of multiple staff within the Department of Archaeology and McDonald Institute. She has held CoI and PI roles with Cambridge staff and has previously been a visiting scholar. Dr M’Mbogori is currently the Senior Research Scientist National Museums of Kenya having previously held the position of Director of the BIEA, president of the Pan-African Archaeological Association and was previously a department head at the National Museums of Kenya.
Affiliation(s): British Institute in Eastern Africa
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Published Work: Ochungo, P., Khalaf, N., Merlo, S., Beldados, A., M'Mbogori, F. N., Tiki, W., & Lane, P. J. (2022). Remote sensing for biocultural heritage preservation in an African semi-arid region: A case study of indigenous wells in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. Remote Sensing, 14(2), Article 314
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Rose Miyonga is a Kenyan-British writer and historian and a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick, where her research focuses on the dynamics of memories of the Mau Mau War in post-independence Kenya. Her current work looks at grassroots histories and memories of Mau Mau in post-colonial Kenya, focusing on the lived experiences of survivors. She argues that survivors have found ways to remember despite and sometimes because of wider processes of suppression and exclusion within public history-making. These central questions, of what Mau Mau memories look like at the margins and how survivors have preserved and made sense of their pasts amid wider political forgetting, have led her to a methodological intervention within the field of Mau Mau studies. Research interests: Kenyan history; legacies of empire and violence; public history; memory studies; history of emotions; post-colonial studies; land justice; archival justice.
Affiliation(s): University of Warwick
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Published Work: Miyonga, R. (2026). Old wounds: Embodying the Mau Mau war in post-colonial Kenya. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 19(4), 693–710.
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Nomawethu Hlazo is a researcher based at the Evolutionary Studies Institute and Rising Star, Cradle of Humankind. She is also a doctoral student at the University of Cape Town, having completed her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Archaeology, followed by a BSc (Hons) and a Master's degree (with distinction). Her research concentrates on geometric morphometrics, and she intends to apply new techniques such as palaeoproteomics to investigate shape change as well as the evolutionary processes and ecological niches occupied by the genus Paranthropus and other species. She has worked at several sites, both in the Cradle of Humankind and in Kenya, and her research has demonstrated that fossil hominins are more diverse and variable than previously expected.
Affiliation(s): University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand
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Published Work: Hlazo, N. P., Schroeder, L., Ritzman, T., & Ackermann, R. R. (2026). The role of selection in shaping the craniomandibular morphology of Paranthropus. In P. J. Constantino, K. E. Reed, & B. A. Wood (Eds.), The forgotten lineage(s): The palaeobiology of Paranthropus (pp. 45–65). Springer.
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Wilson Jilala is a prominent Tanzanian forensic anthropologist, bioarchaeologist, and crime scene investigator, known for his work with the Tanzania Police Force's Forensic Bureau and the National Museum of Tanzania. His contributions span forensic education, disaster victim identification, and the discovery of rare human skeletal variations. His research addresses gaps between Tanzania's legal inquest frameworks and medico-legal training, co-authored findings on unusual femoral anatomy, and explored the traditional handling and storage of human remains alongside the illicit trade in cultural belongings. His recent work examines premarital genetic screening for albinism to prevent discrimination and abuse.
Affiliation(s): University of Dar es Salaam
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Published Work: Jilala, W., & Lwoga, N. (2025). Perspectives on the handling and storage of human remains in Tanzania: A due diligence to restitution plan. Journal of the Kenya National Commission for UNESCO, 5(1).
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Angela Kabiru is a Postgraduate Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA). She has a BA in Archaeology (University of Nairobi), an MSc in Tourism Management (University of Surrey) and an MSc in Geographical Information Sciences (Lund University). Angela has worked at the National Museums of Kenya all her professional life, starting off as a Research Intern, Research Assistant, and now as a Research Scientist. She is an archaeologist specialising in cultural heritage research, tourism development and management, and GIS. Her work focuses on landscape archaeology, settlement pattern analysis, and GIS-based reconstruction of past landscapes. She has experience in archaeological survey, heritage impact assessment, and heritage management within national and international frameworks. Her interests include digital archaeology, remote sensing, and policy-relevant heritage research.
Affiliation(s): British institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA)
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Published Work: Kabiru, A., Ndiaye, A., Michaut, E., Merlo, S., & Lane, P. (2025). "Shoreline dynamics and cultural heritage sites in Kenya, Tanzania, and Senegal: integrating remote sensing and archaeological knowledge." Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, published online 22 April 2025.
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Dr Eva Namusoke is Senior Curator, African Collections Futures, working across collections from and about the African continent in the University of Cambridge’s museums, garden, libraries, archives, and departments. Eva published a report on these collections in December 2024. She was the curator of Bound Together: Leather from Northern Nigeria (2025-2026) at The Fitzwilliam Museum. Eva’s history PhD from the University of Cambridge focused on the development of the Anglican church in Uganda post-independence. She obtained an MA in African Studies from Yale University. After her PhD, Eva worked on the Commonwealth Oral History Project at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS) in London, followed by roles in academia, public health, and policy research in Mauritius and Kampala.
Affiliation(s): University of Cambridge
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Published Work: Namusoke, Eva, African Collections Futures, Apollo - University of Cambridge Repositor, 2024
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Dr Nancy Rushohora is a Tanzanian archaeologist and heritage scholar whose work deeply engages with memory, colonial history, and cultural heritage. She is a Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies staff member and an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter (UK) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Her research more specifically focuses on the archaeology of resistance, heritage, trauma, collective memory, and the politics of photographs and memorialization.
Affiliation(s): University of Dar es Salaam
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Published Work: Rushohora, N. (2024). Tanzania and the Apparent Lack of Restitution Activism. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 50(1), 168-181.
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Syokau Mutonga is a Research and Operations Associate at Open Restitution Africa, an open-data platform seeking to make visible African voices in the restitution debate. For the past decade, she has worked in the cultural heritage sector as an academic, writer, activist and curator, seeking to amplify community voices. Her work explores what it might look like to practice an articulation of Kenya’s painful and problematic past while also leaving it as multiple, unfinished and present. At Open Restitution Africa, she leads the operational side of the work while supporting the research department. Her research work includes putting together databases of key restitution issues, creating research frameworks and carrying out case studies that support the open data platform and empower all stakeholders to make knowledge-based decisions.
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"Karen Byera Ijumba has worked at the intersection of research, culture, creativity and digital knowledge management for over 10 years; interchangeably serving as a trained physical and digital archivist, researcher and academic research project manager. She holds an LLB and BA (Hons) in Heritage and Public Culture from the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and an MA in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She enjoys encountering different ways of being, looking at things as puzzles and maps, and thinking through how bits come together under one nuanced conceptual umbrella. Her work focuses on combining marginalised and fugitive knowledge with creative and digital tools, to address knowledge gaps and issues of power and perspective in knowledge production. She was awarded the NRF Innovation Masters Scholarship in 2016, and jointly received the (NI)HSS Creative Collections - Best Public Performance Award in 2023, for her co-curation of the hybrid 26th Poetry Africa Festival. She also led the development of the Poetry Africa Digital Map. As Senior Researcher at Open Restitution Africa her core responsibilities included working in collaboration with the project's co-founders / Digital and Research leads to conceptualise, develop and evaluate methodologies that embrace the complexities of building an Africa-centred restitution knowledge base and datasets, supporting the design and content population of the open data platform, and overseeing the work of the core and seasonal research team members."
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