Richard Kuba

Biographie

After studying ethnology and African history in Munich and Paris, Richard Kuba completed his PhD in Bayreuth on the precolonial history of West Africa. As a research associate in two collaborative research centers focusing on Africa in Bayreuth and Frankfurt am Main, he conducted extended fieldwork in Nigeria, Benin, and Burkina Faso, and subsequently worked as an assistant at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Since 2005, he has been responsible at the Frobenius Institute for the ethnological image archive, the rock art archive, and the estate archive, and he established the institute’s online image database. From 2014 to 2020, he directed the Franco-German project Histoire croisée de l’ethnologie, and since 2020 he has led a German Research Foundation (DFG) project on “German ethnographic expeditions in the Australian Kimberley.”

His research focuses on the reception history of prehistoric rock art, and he has curated numerous exhibitions, including at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (2016), the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City (2017), the Museum Rietberg in Zurich (2021), and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (2023–24). He is co-editor of the series Studien zur Kulturkunde.