Paul Wolff Mitchell completed his PhD in Anthropology at Penn. His research concerns the history of racial science, anatomy, and museums, and his dissertation focuses on the global collection of human skulls in the long 19th century, following human skull collections as they move from once-living people to scientific objects, and then to sites of political contestation in contemporary universities and museums.
Some of Paul’s research is featured in Penn & Slavery Project’s Augmented Reality App. He is also interested in the history of racial thought in biology and anthropology, questions relating to the ethics of displaying human remains in museums, and the use of genomic data in repatriation.
Penn & Slavery Project Research
Independent Research
- Black Philadelphians in the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection, Penn Program on Race, Science & Society, February 15, 2021.
- Bias, Brains, and Skulls Tracing the Legacy of Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth-Century Works of Samuel George Morton and Friedrich Tiedemann, Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse, 2019.
- The fault in his seeds: Lost notes to the case of bias in Samuel George Morton’s cranial race science, PLoS Bio, October 4, 2018.
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