Peter Pels (1958) is Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology of Africa at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of the University of Leiden since 2003. He graduated in social anthropology at the University of Amsterdam on a study of Catholicism in East Africa (1993), and worked there at the Research Centre Religion and Society between 1995 and 2003. He published on religion and politics under colonialism, the history of anthropology, the anthropology of magic, social science ethics, visual and material culture, archaeology and science fiction. He was the editor-in-chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, from 2003 until 2007. Between 2006 and 2015 he was an advisor to the Çatalhöyük Research Project led by Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder. He is currently interested in questions of race, culture and decolonization as they pertain to museums and heritage.