Staff Profile

David Odo oversees the museums’ academic and public programs, working closely with colleagues from all divisions of the museums and faculty from across the university to provide academic and public audiences opportunities to engage with the collections. This includes Harvard University course collaborations, student programs, and public education at the museums. He is a visual and material anthropologist, with primary research and teaching interests in the anthropology of art, especially early Japanese photography; the body in art and material culture; and the intersections of art and medicine. An expert on 19th-century Japanese photography, Odo has published and lectured widely on museum pedagogy and early photography. He teaches occasionally in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, Summer School, and Extension School and is a founding editorial board member of Trans-Asia Photography Review, an international journal devoted to the discussion of historical and contemporary photography from Asia.