2024-2025 University Of Birmingham PhD Scholarship For Black British Researchers

The PhD will provide a unique opportunity to engage with an under-researched collection of African art at the University of Birmingham (UoB), a discrete collection that is part of Research and Cultural Collections (RCC) - a university museum holding full Museum Accredited status from Arts Council England (ACE) The African Collection is rich and diverse: it celebrates extensive cultural traditions and modern and contemporary artistic expression through a range of objects and media. Communities represented are Yorùbá, Hausa and Asante, and it includes work by artists such as Ben Enwonwu and Justus Akeredolu, as well as an important group of Nigerian modernist paintings by artists associated with the Zaria Arts Society. The PhD has two key aims: It will provide the first in-depth critical assessment of art objects from the collection ever undertaken. It will approach the relation between form, content, and the aesthetics of artworks and objects which traditionally have been labelled as ‘African’ from multiple perspectives. It will critically evaluate art historical notions such as ‘decorative art’ or ‘tourist art’ and emphasize diverse applications of the terms ‘African’ and ‘diaspora’. It will explore how collections of African art might be able to employ new methods and approaches to engage diaspora communities and widen audience participation, including strategies of co-curation, and the use of digital technologies. By doing so, it will contribute to RCC’s ongoing co-curation initiatives, such as ‘Africanize’ in collaboration with ‘We Don’t Settle’ and Black artists in Birmingham and the ongoing programme of community and artist engagement, where focus is directed towards co-research and co-production and HEI researchers working with external researchers from source communities. This PhD is timely and necessary. It will make a significant contribution to current debates around the colonial legacy of museum collections in Europe and North America with special emphasis on the objects’ diasporic agency and significance for source communities. As part of a university collection, research into the African collection will uniquely address calls to decolonise curricula and university collections.