Atypical Anthropologist: Preserving and Interpreting Cultural Heritage through VR

Summary

Produced by the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, this short documentary follows Craig Stevens during his 2025-26 Buffett Dissertation Fellowship as he completes doctoral research in Northwestern University’s Department of Anthropology. The film presents Stevens as an “atypical” anthropologist whose work brings virtual reality, photogrammetry, and 3D digitization into cultural heritage research.

The documentary centers on a method for giving African communities meaningful access to cultural objects held in American museums and other dispersed collections. Stevens uses immersive digital environments to let people encounter, discuss, and interpret artifacts connected to their histories, then routes those community perspectives back into museum and heritage contexts.

The Buffett Institute’s companion article situates the film within Stevens’ 2025-26 Buffett Dissertation Fellowship, tracing the project from Augmented Curiosities to village-based VR sessions in Liberia and foregrounding the museum partnerships that make community interpretation possible.

As a public-facing portrait of the dissertation, the film connects the site’s major research threads: VR community interpretation in Liberia, digital documentation in Nigeria, museum collaboration at Northwestern, and the broader question of how immersive technologies can support more accountable forms of cultural heritage curation.