Centre for African Art and Archaeology
In October 2009, the University of East Anglia established a Centre for African Art and Archaeology to reflect the strong convergence of research and teaching interests related to Africa, in the School of Art History and World Art Studies.
Image: House painting in Senegal
Currently, six members of the School and the Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU)
belong to the Centre, with primary research interests in the visual and material culture of Africa. African arts also play a major role in the collections of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA), which share the School's home in the Norman Foster-designed Sainsbury Centre building. The newly developed Centre for African Art and Archaeology will coordinate this assemblage of interests, bringing together the activities of staff and students to foster the development of research and teaching on the arts, archaeology, and cultural heritage of the African continent.
Africanist members of staff who are part of the Centre include:
Dr Jo Clarke, an archaeologist with extensive fieldwork experience in Western Sahara, Cyprus, and Israel. Her most recent research is concerned with current approaches to the study of long-term changes in the technologies of early agricultural communities, specifically basketry, plaster and pottery. Presently she is co-directing a multi-disciplinary project in the Western Sahara, examining the long-term adaptation of human populations to the drying of the environment in the mid Holocene.
Dr Anne Haour, an archaeologist who focuses on the archaeology of Sahelian West Africa, has conducted excavations in Niger that explore the creation and maintenance of boundaries, the interrelation of archaeological and historical data in descriptions of ‘empires', and the materialisation of contacts through material culture. She has also collaborated with anthropologist colleagues on topics relating to present-day Africa, such as religion and change among the Hausa or modern-day apprenticeship in pottery decoration. These are all questions to be considered in a new project in Bénin, funded by the European Research Council from 2011 to 2016.
Dr Ferdinand de Jong, an anthropologist whose teaching and research interests concern the anthropology of art and material culture, memory and heritage, has conducted extensive fieldwork in Senegal. For his dissertation he researched the practice of secrecy as constitutive for the production of locality. He is currently writing a book on heritage and memory in postcolonial Senegal, focusing on UNESCO World Heritage sites and the commemorations performed there, a project funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. He also leads (with Paul Basu as Co-Investigator) the AHRC Research Network on Utopian Archives: Excavating Pasts for Postcolonial Futures.
Professor John Mack FBA was formerly Keeeper of the Ethnography Department of the British Museum and Director of the Museum of Mankind. His research has focused on Congo, southern Sudan, Kenya, Madagascar and Zanzibar, taking a broadly anthropological approach to art, material culture and archaeology. Recent books have discussed questions of memory and art, and the process of miniaturisation and current projects include experiences of the sea, religious change in northern Kenya and participating in a major UEA study of basketry.
Dr Sam Nixon, an archaeologist specialising in Sahelian West Africa, led excavations at the early Islamic trans-Saharan trading centre of Tadmekka in northern Mali, aiming to better understand the nature of trading societies associated with the early Islamic trans-Saharan trade. He is currently the postdoctoral researcher on the Crossroads project led by Anne Haour.
Dr Christina Riggs, Dr Christina Riggs is a specialist in ancient Egyptian art and is interested in how ideas about ancient Egypt have been formulated in the history of scholarship (including 'alternative' Egyptologies, such as Afrocentrism) and through museum and collecting practices. She has recently edited the Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt and is completing a monograph entitled Unwrapping Ancient Egypt: The Shroud, the Secret, and the Sacred, which considers the wrapping of mummified bodies and sacred images in ancient Egypt, and offers a critical analysis of their unwrapping in modern times.
Members of academic staff in the School who are affiliates of the new Centre include:
Dr Simon Dell (20th century: the reception of African Art in Europe)
Professor Sandy Heslop (‘Traditional' and contemporary African Art)
Events 2013
The Centre for African Art and Archaeology (CFAAA) is pleased to present two seminars for the 2013 semester from Professor John Mack (SIFA) on 5 February 2013 in the SRU seminar room and Dr. Susan Gagliardi on 26 February 2013 (CUNY, City University of New York, Sainsbury Research Unit Postgraduate Fellow, 2013) in the SCVA Education room.
Professor John Mack, FBA was formerly Keeper of the Ethnography Department of the British Museum and Director of the Museum of Mankind. His research has focused on Congo, southern Sudan, Kenya, Madagascar and Zanzibar, taking a broadly anthropological approach to art, material culture and archaeology.
Professor John Mack will present a talk titled:
Sprits without passports: possession and modernity in eastern Africa
SRU Seminar room, University of East Anglia
5 February 2013
17:00pm – 18:30pm
Dr. Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, is a specialist in West African art history. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California at Los Angeles after conducting extensive fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Ghana. Her most recent research focuses on power associations, the great patrons for the arts in Senufo- and Mande-speaking towns across western Burkina Faso and southern Mali. Gagliardi examines the arts, knowledge, and interpersonal networks that power associations promote. She considers how power association leaders, artists, patrons, and audiences shape and respond to dynamic arts and performances. She also investigates diverse strategies for assemblage and tensions between the seen and unseen dimensions of the visual arts. Dr. Susan Gagliardi will present a talk titled:
Masquerading for the Public: Contemporary Arts of Hunters' Associations in Western Burkina Faso.
SCVA, Education Room, University of East Anglia
26 February 2013
17:00pm – 18:30pm
These talks will be followed by drinks and dinner.
Please email M.Mathurin@uea.ac.uk if you'd like to attend the dinner (on a pay your own way basis).
See the Events pages for up-to-date listings of Centre events.
Past events include:
- An Artist's Talk by Atta Kwame
- In conversation with Enid Schildkrout, Chief Curator of the Museum for African Art, New York
- Ceri Ashley, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University College London - Migration, Missionaries and Contact: Recent research on the archaeology of the Khwebe Hills, Botswana.
- Lisa Binder, Assistant Curator for Contemporary Africa at the Museum for African Art, New York - The life and times of a young curator in New York City.
- Dr. Sam Nixon (UCL Institute of Archaeology) - Tadmakka : The archaeology of an early medieval Muslim merchant town on the trans-Saharan trail to West Africa (Republic of Mali).
- Laurence Douny (UCL Department of Anthropology) - Wild silk of West Africa: the production of silk indigo wrappers of Dogon and Marka Dafing people of Mali and Burkina Faso
- Dr Alexandre Livingstone-Smith (Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium) - Not a mere lump of clay in the potters hands: pottery traditions and social boundaries in Katanga (Democratic Republic of Congo)
- Professor Kevin MacDonald, University College London -Sorotomo: Oral Tradition and Archaeology of a Malian Centre of Power (AD 1200-1500)
Enquiries about the Centre and its programmes may be made to its Secretary, Dr Anne Haour, a.haour@uea.ac.uk.