People
Professor Sandra Dudley
Professor of Museum Anthropology; Head of School
School/Department: Museum Studies, School of
Telephone: +44 (0)116 252 3970
Email: shd3@leicester.ac.uk
Profile
Research
My work as an anthropologist centres on museums, art and material culture, forced migration, (post-)conflict and exile. I am interested in all kinds of material culture and making, but I have worked particularly on dress, textiles, ritual artefacts, Asian art and the environments of exile. My research and collaborations have been primarily located in Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, India and the UK.
I am interested in how different kinds of experience and the physical world affect each other, especially in situations where people, things or both are (forcibly) displaced and come into proximity with different people and things. Recently, these areas have come together in my development of a displacement anthropology approach not only to the lives of things and to representation in museums but to how museums might reposition encounters with otherness (Displaced Things, 2021).
My current research is focusing on the role of cultural practices and forms in, and as, resistance and resilience in situations of active conflict.
Publications
Selected books
Dudley, S. H. 2021. Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond: Loss, Liminality and Hopeful Encounters. London and New York: Routledge.
Dudley, S. H. (ed.). 2012a. Museum Objects. Experiencing the Properties of Things. London and New York: Routledge.
Dudley, S. H. 2010a. Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.
Dudley, S. H. (ed.). 2010b. Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations. London and New York: Routledge.
Selected articles and chapters
Dudley, S. H. 2018a. Paku Karen skirt-cloths (not) at home: forcibly migrated Burmese textiles in refugee camps and museums. In L. Auslander and T. Zara (eds.), Objects of War: the Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 277-308.
Dudley, S. H. 2017. Liminality and the object's point of view: Burmese court artefacts in Oxford, London and Yangon. In P. Basu (ed.),The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 39-58.
Dudley, S. H. 2015a. Ritual practice, material culture and wellbeing in displacement: ka-thow-bow in a Karenni refugee camp in Thailand. In A. Horstmann and J. Jung (eds.), Building Noah's Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 101-126.
Dudley, S. H. 2015b. What, or where, is the (museum) object? Colonial encounters in displayed worlds of things. In A. Witcomb and K. Message (eds.), Museum Theory, vol. I of The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, eds. S. Macdonald and H. Rees Leahy. London and New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 41-62.
Dudley, S. H. 2014. What's in the drawer? Surprise and proprioceptivity in the Pitt Rivers Museum. The Senses and Society, 9 (3): 296-309.
Dudley, S. H. 2011. Material visions: dress and textiles. In M. Banks & J. Ruby (eds.), Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 45-73.
Supervision
I currently supervise students working on a range of research topics. I am interested in supervising students working on objects, art and material culture, collections, materiality, making, representation and/or experience and encounter, within contexts/subject areas including:
- museum ethnography; material and museum anthropology
- textiles and dress
- displacement, forced migration and exile
- anthropologies of art
- religion and ritual
- mainland Southeast Asia, particularly Myanmar; the UK.
Teaching
Press and media
Museum objects.
Museum collections.
Myanmar (Burma).
Museums and cultural heritage in ODA-recipient (developing) countries.
Museum and heritage training and research in ODA-recipient (developing) countries.
Museums and cultural heritage in peace-building/post-conflict.