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.

PhD Opportunity: Tan See Bock Studentship at Northumbria University

Northumbria University Gallery holds the Woon Collection of Asian Art, which includes a significant number of rare ancient Chinese bronzes including a standing and a seated Acuoye Guanyin both from the late Nanzhao Kingdom (AD 653-902) and an Amitabha Buddha and a Vairocana Buddha, both seated in Dhyanasana pose, from the Dali Kingdom (AD 937-1253). The project would further our understanding of the histories, iconographies, collecting and display of ancient Chinese bronzes in the Woon Collection and other collections around the world, as well as their composition and methods of manufacture. The successful PhD student would help shape our understanding of the best approaches to the care, interpretation and exhibition of ancient Chinese bronzes in museum collections and the influences on the technology used. Although there is research on the history of early Chinese bronzes from this area, there is little from the technological perspective. 

Full details available here.

AHRC PhD studentship: Biocultural knowledge, power and poetics in South American featherwork

Birkbeck, University of London, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Training grant from October 2020 to undertake research on South American objects made by Indigenous peoples out of feathers, of with feathers attached, in the Pitt River Museum’s collections. 

Exploring South American featherwork in the PRM collections, this interdisciplinary, practice-based doctoral project will seek to develop ways of telling histories of specific objects that shed light not only on the historical processes of collection in the field and the ‘lives’ of the objects in the museum, but also on contemporary debates on Indigenous cultural identity, sovereignty and heritage rights, as well as the dynamic relationships among Indigenous peoples, birds, and environments. The project aims to provide understanding of these feathered objects as historical biocultural objects, which afford ways of telling the histories in which biodiversity emerges.

This project will be jointly supervised by Professor Luciana Martins, Birkbeck and Dr Laura Van Broekhoven, Oxfordand the student will be expected to spend time at both Birkbeck and the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK. 

We are looking for an excellent, highly promising and appropriately qualified student who will embrace the opportunity to bring together academic research in museum studies with experience and training in a leading British museum.

We want to encourage the widest range of potential students to study for a CDP doctoral training grant and are committed to welcoming students from different backgrounds to apply for our doctoral training grants.

In general, full doctoral training grants are available to students who are settled in the UK and have been ordinarily resident for a period of at least three years before the start of postgraduate studies. Fees-only awards are generally available to EU nationals resident in the EEA. International applicants are normally not eligible to apply for this doctoral training grant.

Hours: The doctoral training grant is available on either a full-time or part-time basis.

Closes: Friday 13 March 2020

Interviews will be held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, on 27 March 2020.

Further information

For further details on the studentship and how to apply please follow the link below.

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/research/research-bursaries-studentships-funding/ahrc-collaborative-doctoral-training-grant

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award: Rupununi re-collections: historical photographs, Indigenous knowledge and heritage in Guyana

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship on historical photographs, Indigenous knowledge and heritage in Guyana at Royal Holloway University of London, in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and Kew Gardens. This award is made by the Science Museums & Archives Consortium under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. The project, due to begin in September 2020, will be supervised by Prof Jay Mistry and Prof Felix Driver at Royal Holloway and Dr Catherine Souch at the RGS-IBG, with further support from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

This project aims to reconnect historical photographs documenting Indigenous peoples and practices to contemporary initiatives concerning Indigenous knowledge and heritage development. Working in the Rupununi region of Guyana, the project will explore the use of significant photographic archives as a resource to enrich the understanding of Indigenous knowledge and practices, Indigenous heritage, identity and rights in contemporary Guyana. It will link work on Indigenous knowledge and memory with collections-based research, using methods of visual elicitation and digital repatriation in collaboration with the relevant Indigenous communities. The project combines (a) archival research in UK collections with (b) field-based photo-elicitation in the Rupununi. A participatory action research framework will allow research questions to be refined and addressed with participants in an iterative way to produce tangible benefits. The student will be encouraged to use participatory video as a way of creating new interpretative narratives. The possibility of a small-scale exhibition will also be considered in order to engage with wider audiences in Guyana.

A full project description is available here

Further information on eligibility, funds and how to apply is available here 

The application deadline is 31 March 2020

Interviews will be held at the RGS-IBG, provisionally on 16 April 2020.

Further Information

Details of the project and how to apply:

https://royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/geography/news/gg_ahrc-phd-studentship_2020/

PhD research in Geography at Royal Holloway:

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/geography/studying-here/postgraduate/

RGS-IBG collaborative doctoral research:

https://www.rgs.org/about/our-collections/collaborative-research-on-the-collections/

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships:

https://www.ahrc-cdp.org/

PhD Opportunity: Reframing Oceania: towards new narratives of the colonial Pacific in the British Museum

A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship between the British Museum and UCL, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Start date: 1st October 2019


Application Deadline: 12 April
Interviews will take place on 24 April

Supervisors
Dr Gaye Sculthorpe (British Museum)

Prof. Margot Finn (UCL)

Project Overview

This PhD project will interrogate archives, objects and images in the British Museum pertaining to Oceania to identify what new stories emerge and consider how these histories of the colonial Pacific could be constructed and publicly presented. Attentive to individual histories and Indigenous agency, the project will promote new perspectives on the distinctive histories of Pacific Islanders and their relationship with other parts of the world, particularly Britain. The emphasis will be on the period c.1820-1920.

This project aims to go beyond research focused only on specific places, object types, or specific collectors to consider how the ensemble of resources about these collections can be interrogated to generate new narratives. It will address inter-relationships and broad themes relevant across the Pacific, and can draw on examples from any place, group of people, or object. There will be room for the student to shape the research within this broad context.

As well as opportunities for working with the collections in London, there will be networking opportunities to work with colleagues and communities in Oceania as well as at the British Museum.

Full details and information about how to appy can be found on the UCL website.

PhD opportunity: Leather trousers and Leopard skin waistcoats: Missing objects and endangered material knowledge in the Kalahari

A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship between the British Museum and the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Start date: 1st October 2019

Stoffel Speelman by William Burchell

Application Deadline: Friday 3rd May 2019 at 23h59min
Interviews will take place on Monday 20th May 2019 at UEA in Norwich

Supervisors
Dr Chris Wingfield (Sainsbury Research Unit)

Prof. Ceri Ashley (British Museum)

Project Overview 
In a letter to his brother dated 12 April 1823, the early missionary to South Africa, Robert Moffat (1951, 72), wrote:

As to clothing, I shall first mention what can be procured here. I often wear a Bichuana cap made of fox [jackal] skins. Trousers of a prepared antelope skin… Last winter I had a waistcoat and jacket made of tiger [leopard] skin for the cold weather.

The British Museum holds a number of artefacts sent to London by Moffat, acquired from the London Missionary Society museum (Wingfield 2018), but, sadly, no leather trousers or leopard skin waistcoats. In attempting to tell alternative stories that challenge museum visitors’ perceptions about the past, it can become necessary to consider objects that did not find their way into museum collections, and to explore ways in which they may nevertheless be implicated in these collections.

The primary focus of this project are the relevant historic collections at the British Museum: a number of more traditional leather items, as well as needles and needle cases (some made from leather), and knives (some with sheaths made from leather). Worn suspended from the neck by leather straps, these speak to the significance of leather processing in the daily lives of many nineteenth century Kalahari residents.

This PhD will involve working with relevant collections alongside historic accounts to develop a detailed understanding of nineteenth century leather and skin processing in the Kalahari. It is anticipated that it will also involve a period of fieldwork, working with partners in Botswana, to document contemporary methods used by craftspeople in the region today.

Fulll details of the project and information about how to apply are available on the UEA website.

PhD Opportunity: The historic role of missionary societies in shaping children’s understandings of Britain’s place in the world

A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship between the National Maritime Museum and the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
 

The Hope of the World, Harold Copping

Start date: October 2019

Application Deadline: Friday 3rd May 2019 at 23h59min
Interviews will take place on Tuesday 21stMay 2019 in Greenwich

Supervisors
Dr Chris Wingfield (Sainsbury Research Unit)
Dr Robert Blyth (National Maritime Museum)

Project Overview 
In The Making of English National Identity (2003) Krishan Kumar argued that English identity was characterised by a form of ‘missionary nationalism’:

a nationalism that finds its principle not so much in equating state and nation as in extending the supposed benefits of a particular nation’s rule and civilization to other peoples. 

Kumar did not, however, particularly probe the ‘missionary’ component of ‘missionary nationalism’ – the degree to which exposure to missionary propaganda from a young age profoundly shaped the political, cultural and social attitudes adopted by many children in later life.

For generations of children growing up in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain,
 it was at Sunday school that they first came into contact with images of people living in other parts of the world. The scale of this impact should not to be underestimated. Susan Thorne (2006, 143) has suggested that ‘virtually every working-class child attended Britain’s massively popular Sunday Schools at one point or another’.

Images commissioned by Britain’s missionary societies formed part of their extensive educational programmes, and frequently embodied ideas about Britain’s providential role in the world (Brewer 2005). We might read these in terms of nineteenth-century ideas about ‘the White Man’s burden’, and as part of what we might now call historical constructions of ‘whiteness’, or perhaps more controversially 'the white saviour complex'.

As Britain embarks on a new chapter in its relationship with the wider world, it becomes increasingly important to re-consider the ways in which this relationship has been imagined in the past. While ‘decolonisation’ has become a buzzword in both museum and academic circles, it has frequently been associated with the attitudes and positions associated with ‘high imperialism’. This project is intended to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which forms of benevolent paternalism were shaped and propagated in the context of British missionary societies, through their engagements with children and young people across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Full details of the project and information about how to applay are available on the UEA website.

Writing the Ethnological Museum - PhD Opportunity

Supervisory team: Dr Priya Gopal (Cambridge) and Professor Dan Hicks (Pitt Rivers Museum)

This collaborative project uses the historic inscription practices of the Pitt Rivers Museum as a lens through which to study the history and ongoing legacies of the knowledge made through colonialism in the context of the ethnographic museum. Primary material includes all writing practices involved in the functioning of the anthropological museum as an institution from 1884 to the present day: from vocabularies of people and thing to museum labels as a genre, a narratology of annual reports and accession books, a close reading of the card index and database, and the study of the diversity of practices of writing on objects. The hands of particular curators and collectors and the re-writing of museum displays will be put into dialogue with a broader set of questions about the relationships between objectification through material culture and representation through text.

In a cross-disciplinary perspective that brings literary analysis into dialogue with linguistic anthropology through material culture, the research  will involve a literary study of language, writing and speech acts as imperial technologies of objectification in the academy in the past, and a consideration of the scope for rereading and revision today.

Case studies will be drawn from across the geographical, temporal and disciplinary scope of the Pitt Rivers, from Asia and Africa to the Americas and Oceania, with regional or thematic focuses developing from the student’s own interests.

The research will be conducted at the intersection between a series of present themes in postcolonial literary and museum studies, including thinking about ‘voice’; the politics of representation/self-representation; technologies of writing; the making and unmaking of cultural, racial and gendered identities; archival silences and archival traces; reparative histories; the construction of narratives of self and other; the politics of the ‘contact zone’ and encounter and the question of ‘culture wars’; aesthetics and politics; the constitution and/or reframing of the archive; the politics of the particular and the universal; authority and authorship; narrative strategies and ‘narrativity’; (re)reading against the grain; and resistance, dialogics and rewriting.

The contemporary politics of empire and colonialism and their ongoing legacies will be central to the project, but in supple ways which allow for considerations of resistance, reflexivity and reconstitution. It might be possible, for instance, to consider the ways in which texts can function as colonial disciplinary and governance mechanisms while examining the possibilities for radical rewriting and re-imagining in the wake of empire. A number of questions might govern a study:

• Can colonial documents/collections/practices be deployed towards new political claims or imaginings of community?
• What forms of ‘epistemic co-operation’ might be possible in the reconstitution of collections or archives?
• Can the collection(s) in question at all enable a revisioning of the relationship between the particular and the universal?
• How might the voices of resistance be found in the interstices or margins of colonial knowledge?
• Do the collections entrench epistemic scepticism or can they serve to provide reparative histories and knowledges?
• In the process of ‘objectification’, does the ‘subject’ disappear entirely?

The student will have a background in literary studies, and a demonstrable interest in any aspect of postcolonial studies, archival studies, or anthropology. 

Application process:

For details of how to apply, please see: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/19544/.  

Galloway Trust PhD scholarship, University of Aberdeen

The Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen has just advertised the Galloway Trust PhD scholarship.  Candidates with research interests in any area of Anthropology that fits within the department’s research themes (one of which is Museums and Histories of Science) and who either already have a Masters in Anthropology with research training, or are currently studying for one, are welcome to apply. The scholarship is open to Home/EU students and covers fees and a stipend for three years. The closing date is 31 January 2019. 

Information is available on the University of Aberdeen website.   

PhD opportunities with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Collecting Papua New Guinea; what, where, when, why, and how

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery has an extensive collection of material culture and archival material from Papua New Guinea collected from the 1920s until the 1980s by missionaries, colonial administrators, and aid development workers. It includes clothing, body adornment, ritual paraphernalia, domestic utensils, ceramics, musical instruments, and archival records.  The aim of the PhD is to enhance curatorial methodologies for collections interrogation and to challenge the role of museums in a post-colonial world. It will make a valuable contribution to understanding changing collection practices; material culture evolution in practice; the relationship between collections and archives; the role of the collector in cultural development of the source community; the role material culture plays in representing a society and the stories they tell about that society.

Academic Contact:  Dr Tamar Hodos, University of Bristol – t.hodos@bristol.ac.uk

Collections Contact: Lisa Graves, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery – Lisa.Graves@bristol.gov.uk

This is in partnership with the University of Exeter (contact: Professor Linda Hurcombe – L.M.Hurcombe@exeter.ac.uk)

For further information and how to apply visit the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership website.