Shut Up & Write! New for Leicester

Inspired by posts on #WIASN (if you’re a woman in academia, you *must* join #WIASN – look them up on Facebook) and fully aware that I struggle to write without any external motivation, I’ve decided to set up a regular Shut Up & Write! session in Leicester (if you don’t know what Shut Up &…

New Chinese Propaganda pages on the British Library website

Great news! The British Library now has an online guide to the Chinese Propaganda poster collection, which includes a downloadable list of posters with their shelfmarks, based on the catalogue I put together at the end of last year.    

New course: Socially Engaged Practice in Museums and Galleries

At the School of Museum Studies’ Fiftieth Anniversary Conference, Museums in the Global Contemporary, last week, a brand new course, ‘Socially Engaged Practice in Museums and Galleries, was launched. I was involved in its development, last summer, as Research Associate on the project, and it’s great to see that all that hard work has come to…

Draft programme: The Museum in the Global Contemporary: Debating the Museum of Now

The draft programme for the forthcoming Leicester Museum Studies Fiftieth Anniversary Conference is now available on the ‘Global Contemporary’ website (where you can also book a place). Me and Malika Kraamer will be presenting a paper – ‘Unplaced heritage: Making identity through fashion’ – on Wednesday, 20th April, which is based on the chapter we’re…

What makes a good museum? The Art Fund knows

Some time ago I was commissioned by The Conversation to write a short article on the Art Fund prize. Thanks to The Conversation’s open access policy and use of Creative Commons licenses, I am free to republish the article here (originally published July 11, 2014). Image: Yorkshire Sculpture Park (the winner of the 2014 Museum of the…

Academic activities: an update

In the last week I’ve: been on four trains; visited London and Sheffield; given two presentations; re-evaluated my future career plans; and eaten some fantastic food courtesy of the AHRC. Last Monday I travelled down to the British Library once more (but hopefully not for the last time) to hand over the final version of the catalogue…

‘Japanese Saris: Dress, Globalisation and Multiple Migrants’

The paper that Malika Kraamer and myself recently published in Textile History is finally available online [requires institutional access]. Based on primary research undertaken for the Cultural Olympiad exhibition, ‘Suits and Saris’, the paper looks at: … the phenomenon of Japanese saris — fashion-forward synthetic saris manufactured in Japan — and Leicester sari shop owners’ role in…

Revolutionary nian hua at the British Library

On a suitably ‘new year’ theme,* my blogpost about a set of revolutionary nian hua prints from 1950 has been posted to the British Library’s Asia and Africa blog. The image is a detail from Jian zheng huan xuan hao ren (建政懽選好人), ‘Good people happily select a government’, by ‘Wulejibatu’ (烏勒吉巴图) of Inner Mongolia (Neimeng, 内蒙]). Revolutionary nian…

Chinese propaganda posters and the thorny issue of copyright

Just popping by to mention that BICC has published a blog post by me on the thorny issue of Chinese propaganda posters and copyright, based on research I have been doing during my three month postdoc at the British Library.  I was surprised by the advice we were given with reference to digitisation and public…

BICC Cultural Engagement Project – British Library

In preparation for my forthcoming three month postdoc at the British Library, a little profile of me and my project has been published on the British Inter-University China Centre (BICC) website. I’m raring to go and can’t wait to get my hands (I’ll be careful – promise!) on the British Library’s largely unresearched-to-date collection of Chinese…