Nicholas Thomas, director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge since 2006, is an anthropologist and historian.

He visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands and later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific itself.

His books include Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (2003) and Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.