PhD opportunity: Women collectors of South Asia: gender, material culture, and empire

The University of Lincoln and the British Museum are pleased to announce the availability of a fully-funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from October 2020 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme. We encourage applications from suitable candidates with relevant experience, as well as coming from an academic background. This studentship can be studied full or part-time.

This project explores the critical role that women played in collecting objects from South Asia during the colonial and post-colonial eras, highlighting the agency of women of all backgrounds in the formation of museum collections and knowledge production.

This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Sarah Longair and Dr Sushma Jansari and the student will be expected to spend time at both the University of Lincoln and the British Museum, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK.

Project Overview

This project will investigate the lives, collections, activities, writings, and networks of women collectors and donors of material culture from South Asia to the British Museum and other collections in the UK. It will explore how and why women collected objects and what motivated them, how they acquired knowledge about their collections and the dynamics of their donation of objects to museums.

With a focus on objects from South Asia, this project will be set in a colonial and/or post-colonial context, during which South Asian, British, and later British South Asian women negotiated the challenges of living under the British Empire and its aftermath. It will make an important and original contribution to our understanding of the British Museum as well as other institutions, demonstrating how gender, race, and empire influenced the forging of collections. It will examine how far collecting and engagement with material culture was a means for women to establish their own network, and how these factors aligned with or challenged racial and social divides in imperial and post-imperial settings.

Using the British Museum as a starting point, it will trace the lives of selected women and their collections and donations to the British Museum and other UK museums. Objects themselves will be studied as well as associated archival material. Personal papers and publications will shed further light on the way in which women collected and donated, the networks within which they acted, intermediaries who assisted them, and how this knowledge was disseminated. The research will require the student to spend time researching at the British Museum, along with other museums and archives.

 Further details and information about how to apply can be found on the University of Lincoln website.  

Deadline: 9 June

Interviews are likely to take place on Friday 26 June at the British Museum if permitted by then, otherwise online.

PhD Opportunity: Imagaining the Pacific in Scotland

Applications are now invited for a fully funded AHRC PhD studentship on the project 'Imagining the Pacific in Scotland in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries: Collectors and Collections, Museums and Universities' at the University of East Anglia and National Museums Scotland. Applications will close at 5pm on Monday 01 June 2020. Interviews will be held on Thursday 11 June 2020 via Microsoft Teams.

For full details of the project, the studentship and how to apply visit the Sainsbury's Research Unit website.

Job Opportunity: Postdoctoral Researcher: The Restitution of Knowledge - artefacts as archives in the (post)colonial museum, 1850- 1939 Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Applications are invited for the position of Postdoctoral Researcher on the project The Restitution of Knowledge: artefacts as archives in the (post)colonial museum, 1850- 1939, based at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and led by Professor Dan Hicks (Oxford) and Professor Bénédicte Savoy (Technische University, Berlin). The position is funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and is a fixed-term position for 30 months, running from 1 August 2020 to 31 January 2023. 'The Restitution of Knowledge' is a major new transnational UK-German collaboration combining historical and curatorial approaches to understand the status of collections from the continent of Africa in European museums as colonial legacies. The project seeks to intervene in current dialogues about restitution by generating and sharing of knowledge about the ongoing histories of colonial loot. The project combines digital scholarship, provenance studies, and military history to expand public understanding and debate around incidents of colonial plunder, joining the dots between museum collections and these violent histories. The Restitution of Knowledge thus revaluates the status of anthropological museums as places filled not just with objects but also with historical knowledge of conflict, violence and loss. It explores how Europe's “world culture” museums might be reframed as places of cultural memory, at which research can start to support restitution processes, from remembrance and the sharing of knowledge to the physical return of property. The successful candidate will hold a PhD in anthropology, history, archaeology or another relevant discipline, completed before 1 July 2020. The post will start on 1 August 2020, or as soon as possible thereafter.  The closing date for applications is 12.00 midday on Thursday 11 June 2020. Interviews are likely to take place week beginning 15 June 2020. Applications are particularly welcome from black and minority ethnic candidates, who are under-represented in academic posts at the University of Oxford. Please visit the University of Oxford website for more details.

Call for papers: Settler responsibilities towards decolonisation

The University of Auckland is hosting a Marsden Funded international symposium in February 2021, and invites submissions from across the arts. Given the uncertain nature of the Covid-19 situation, the University is preparing to host this conference virtually if needed.

This symposium will delve into the possible roles and responsibilities involved with decolonisation, focusing on both theoretical and empirical research that explores these issues in Aotearoa New Zealand and elsewhere in the indigenous-settler world.

Papers from all disciplines that examine these issues are welcome, and accommodation and meals will be provided for accepted participants.

The deadline for a paper proposal and Curriculum Vitae is 31 May 2020.

Full details on their website. 

Statement from the MEG Committee to the membership in the light of COVID19

We hope you are all well in these strange times, and managing the difficulties and
distractions of working from home, or of being furloughed. We are aware that members who
have been furloughed may not be able to access work e-mails if that is the address we have,
so communication is difficult unless people check the website.

MEG is still working. You should have heard (as if you hadn’t guessed) that this year’s
conference at Liverpool is cancelled. We are planning to publish the papers that would have
been given as JME 34, for distribution next year. We are looking at plans for the 2021
Conference and will share them as soon as we can. We are assuming that by May next
year it will be possible to hold the conference. We hope so, as the conference is the main
networking opportunity for members to meet and share ideas.

The AGM has to be held, so that will be held by Zoom on 29 May. You will receive an
invitation to attend soon, with the papers you need. Please sign up via Eventbrite as this will
allow us to know how many people plan to attend and to send you the zoom link you will
need. We need to be quorate so it would be good to see as many members as possible.
JME 33, from the Horniman conference, is in process, but posting will be difficult without
access to the envelope stock, locked in Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. The plan is to send a
pdf to all members, so you can read the papers in lockdown, and the physical journal will be
posted as soon as possible once life opens up again.

Emma Martin has been working on collating all repatriation information into a Padlet,
something similar to Trello and other planning tools. This will be accessible via the MEG
website soon, as a resource for all to use in planning for repatriations, or starting discussions
about repatriations, or just wanting to know what has happened around the world and where
sources of information and contacts are. It is an important piece of work, thank you Emma
and all the people who sent in material to go on it. If you have papers from requests or
returns that are not yet on there, we would like to add them to the Padlet. We are looking at
managing access to sensitive papers. We hope that this will become the place for advice
and information, and MEG can offer advice on individual cases.

We had planned to run a skills sharing event on writing ‘Reparation and Restitutions
statements for your museum’ at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich in the Autumn,
we would now like to offer this as a virtual event instead, more details on this event will be
announced soon,

The ability to pull this material together and offer support to museums relies on specialist
staff in post. The loss of World Cultures curators over the last few years is concerning, and
once museums reopen and stabilise we hope to carry out a survey of specialist posts, to
map where the specialist knowledge is, where collections have no specialist care, and the
posts lost. This baseline data may help to argue for the retention of posts at risk and the
reinstatement of deleted posts, although in a post–lockdown economy all bets are off.
Planned events have been postponed – repatriation workshop with Manchester Museum
and Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), and the
Barkcloth Basics workshops - but we hope that these will be rescheduled as soon as it is
possible to do so, and hope that people will want to attend. The Events officer is planning

events for later in the year, and if this goes on for a year we will be looking at different ways
of keeping members networked and involved.

Take care
MEG Committee

Disposal of South Pacific and Australsian objects by Derby County Council

Derbyshire County Council are looking to re-home 72 South Pacific and Australasian objects from the Derbyshire Schools Library Service World Cultures collection. These consist of statues, jewellery, textiles, weapons and shields, among others, and which are listed in the attached document. Priority will be given to Accredited Museums and recipient institutions must arrange/pay for collection from Buxton.

If you are interested please fill in an 'expression of interest form' for each object and email to esmeefairbairn.programme@derbyshire.gov.uk, or Bret.Gaunt@derbyshire.gov.uk by Tuesday 30th June 2020.
 Further details and the form can be found on the Museums Association website.

Disposal of African objects by Derby County Council

Derbyshire County Council are looking to re-home 126 African objects from the Derbyshire Schools Library Service World Cultures collection. These consist of statues, jewellery, textiles, headrests, weapons and shields, among others, and which are listed in the attached document. Priority will be given to Accredited Museums and recipient institutions must arrange/pay for collection from Buxton.

If you are interested please fill in an 'expression of interest form' for each object and email to esmeefairbairn.programme@derbyshire.gov.uk, or Bret.Gaunt@derbyshire.gov.uk by Tuesday 30th June 2020. Further details and the form can be found on the Museums Association website.