Wayne Modest is Director of Content of Wereldmuseum, with locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.
A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, together with Tim Barringer). He is currently working on several publication projects including Museum Temporalities (with Peter Pels, forthcoming Routledge) and Curating the Colonial (with Chiara de Cesari, forthcoming Routledge). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, the Kingston Biennial (2022) entitled Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon) and What We Forget (2019) with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.