VIBE NIELSEN

Social anthropologist with a background in Museum Studies, Modern Culture and European Ethnology, working on issues related to the decolonisation of museums, botanical gardens and public places.​

 

As a postdoctoral researcher at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Vibe Nielsen leads the three-year research project Passion or Politics? The art collecting practices of Carl Jacobsen in a socioeconomic and cultural political context 1878-1914. The research project, which is funded by the Ny Carlsberg Foundation, examines the international influences and cultural political agendas that motivated the establishment of the collections of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. As part of the research project, she co-organises the international conference 'Collecting and Classifying: How Museums of the Late-Nineteenth Century Shaped the Modern World' held at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters.

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Vibe Nielsen is affiliated with the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow at Linacre College, an Associate Researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum and an Academic Visitor at the Department of the History of Art. In Trinity Term 2025, she co-organised the prestigious Linacre Lecture Series, 'Communicating Culture: New Horizons for Museums' delving into the dynamics of cultural communication and exploring the unprecedented challenges and opportunities facing art, archaeology and anthropology in a rapidly changing world.

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She holds a PhD in Anthropology (2019), an MA in Modern Culture (2015) and a BA in European Ethnology (2010) from the University of Copenhagen, as well as an MA in Museum Studies (2012) from University College London. She was recently elected Member of the Young Academy at the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters.

 

Vibe Nielsen has worked and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a long list of institutions, including museums, universities, botanical gardens and other cultural organisations in Denmark, France, Italy, Nepal, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

 

The findings of her research is published in English, French and Danish, in academic, peer-reviewed journals and anthologies for academic and broader audiences alike. In 2023, she co-edited and contributed to the Routledge-anthology Global Art in Local Art Worlds: Changing Hierarchies of Value, which is available to download Open Access. Other highlights include her journal articles 'Public Presentations of Plants: Colonial Legacies and Indigenous Perspectives in the Botanical Gardens of The Huntington' (2025), 'The Colonial Roots of Botany - Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew' (2023) and 'In the Absence of Rhodes - Decolonizing South African Universities' (2021). She regularly communicates her research in newspapers, online magazines, radio programmes and podcasts, as well as in guest lectures and public talks.