About us
Milking It! is a collaboration between Johanna Zetterström-Sharp and JC Niala. Their different routes into questions of milk — through museum collections, histories of agricultural science, land-based research and work in Kenya and the UK — are central to the project. Bringing those perspectives together has allowed them to ask not only how dairying systems developed, but how particular forms of knowledge about milk came to seem authoritative, ordinary or natural. Together they are working on a book about milk due to be published in 2028..
Johanna zetterström-sharp
Johanna is Associate Professor in Heritage Studies at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. Prior to coming to UCL in 2022, she worked as Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in South London, and as Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, London. Johanna’s fascination with the colonial history of milk began at the Horniman, when she was documenting a collection relating to an agricultural scientist who worked on a cattle breeding program in Ibadan, Nigeria. This included transporting Devonshire Friesian cows by boat and plane, and aimed to increase the volume of milk that could be produced.
The collection led her to archives of the Food and Agricultural Organisation, the Kenya National Archives, and the Museum of English Rural Life. These archives raised questions about whose knowledge is missing in the production of global expertise relating to dairy, and the impacts of this.
Johanna’s wider academic work explores colonial pasts and presents with a focus on disciplinary knowledge production. She has published on how racism and colonialism became embedded in the establishment of professional expertise and practice across a range of fields. Her research draws heavily on professional archives, applying a cultural lens to understanding the imaginaries and aspirations that shaped the way people framed their roles and responsibilities. She has a forthcoming book about the British museum sector in the 1970s-90s, that looks at how museum workers understood their relevance in relation to the far right, immigration, and wider political post-colonial movements.
JC Niala
JC Niala is the Deputy Director and Head of Research, Teaching and Collections at History of Science Museum, University of Oxford. She was previously Head of World Collections at Cambridge University Libraries. JC has a dual interest in developing methodologies for community engaged research and examining the role of heritage in sustainability. Milk serves as a fascinating case study for her, as it integrates the production of scientific knowledge, heritage, human-animal relationships, and the tensions between public and private spheres.
She has conducted land-based research in both the UK and Kenya and is eager to engage with individuals who work with land and milk-producing animals as part of their cultural practices and livelihoods. Additionally, she is a nature writer. Her latest book The New Eden: Wildlife in the City and Discovering Our Shared Home explores human-nature co-existence in urban spaces. She is currently working on A Loveliness of Ladybirds, a book about inheritance — personal, cultural and ecological — threaded through her experiences of growing on allotments in Oxford. It will be published by Little Toller in 2027.