Pitt Rivers Museum - University of Oxford

Media, Culture and Sport’s Human Remains Advisory Group and advised the National
Maritime Museum on its ‘Atlantic World’ gallery redevelopment. She presented a number of
conference papers, including: ‘On the Treatment of Dead Enemies…’, at the 2007 Garrod
Seminar, Cambridge University Department of Archaeology; and ‘Finding Long-Lost
Relatives (Making the Absent Present): On the Potentialities of Ethnographic Collections in
Ireland’ and ‘The Globe in a Glass Case: Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’, both at the
Anthropological Association of Ireland conference held in Belfast, 11–12 May 2007. She
obtained a grant of $2,000 from the Government of Canada for research into the nineteenthcentury
artist Peter Rindisbacher. She was also awarded a grant of £7,500 from the British
Academy for the pilot project ‘Digital Access for First Nations Heritage in UK Museums’.
She convened the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series in Material Anthropology and
Museum Ethnography, with Chris Morton, and continued to tutor, lecture, and examine
undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology as well as graduate students in Material
Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and in Visual Anthropology.
Alison Petch continued work as a researcher on the ESRC-funded project ‘The Other Within:
The Anthropology of Englishness’ and continued to serve as the Museum’s Registrar. She
also assisted with packing part of the English stone tool collections, which provided a good
opportunity to review these collections more closely for the ‘Other Within’ project. As in
previous years, she provided training for new members of staff and volunteers on the
collections management databases. She also contributed to the series of introductory talks for
the graduate students in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She was elected
to serve as a member of the committee of the Museum Ethnographers Group. She visited a
number of museums and collections during the year: for example, in November 2006 she
studied the Spencer and Gillen collections at Manchester Museum, while in June 2007 she
provided advice to National Museums Scotland about its Australian collections and its
proposed new displays. In April 2007, with Chris Wingfield, she gave a seminar in the
Museum’s lunchtime series on the ‘Other Within’ project. In May she presented a paper at
the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference at the National Maritime Museum
entitled ‘Commercial Gain? The Relationships between Ethnographic Collectors, Dealers and
Auction Houses: A Case Study’.
Heather Richardson assisted with conservation and artefact-handling training for Museum
staff and students and supervised conservation interns. Following external assessment in
October 2006, she became an accredited conservator (ACR) through the Institute of
Conservation in March 2007. In November 2006 she attended the two-day conference ‘Don’t
Panic: Dealing with Hazardous Materials in Museum Collections’, organized by the Care of
Collections and Metals sections of the Institute of Conservation, at Birmingham Museum and
Art Gallery. In April 2007 she attended a one-day seminar ‘Responding to Climate Change’.
In June she attended a three-day course on the ‘Preservation and Conservation of
Photographs’ hosted by the Museum. In November 2006 and May 2007 she attended two
training days as part of the Emergency Response Unit for the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire,
and Oxfordshire region. In February 2007 she was invited to join the Board of Trustees of the
Leather Conservation Centre.
Mandy Sadan took up a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College in October 2006. In
January 2007 she commenced a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the
Museum. Her project, for which she has been awarded a grant of £211,116, is entitled
‘“Economies of Ethnicity”: Material, Visual and Oral Cultures and the Formation of Ethnic
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