Professor and Curator Emeritus Leopold Pospisil’s pioneering research in Papua New Guinea has provided the Yale Peabody Museum with one of its most important ethnographic collections.

Curator in the Division of Anthropology from 1956 until his retirement in 1993, he has continued to be active in Museum affairs, curating the exhibition Spirit Images: The Lidz Collection of Southwest Pacific Art on New Guinea in 1997, which focused on the Sepik River region of New Guinea, the most important art center of the vast area known as Oceania. Several of his students also acquired Oceanic ethnographic collections that are housed at the Yale Peabody Museum.