Joshua A. Bell

Dr. Joshua A. Bell is Curator of Globalization at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with research in museums and archives, Bell's work broadly examines the shifting local and global network of relationships between persons, artefacts and the environment. Since 2000 Bell has worked with with communities in the Purari Delta, an ecologically diverse tidal estuary on Papua New Guinea’s south coast, to document the region's social, economic and environmental transformations in the wake of regional resource extraction. Since 2011 he has been examining various dimensions of cellular technology's impacts on humans through ethnographic research in Washington DC. He has ongoing research projects on the history of collections at the Smithsonian, history and cultural change in Melanesia, and on the social impacts of mobile technology.