MAA research projects archive
Re-collecting on the Missionary Road
The intention of this project is to re-collect and re-assemble a wide range of artefacts associated with the missionary road. In the longer term, the project will result in a major exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, scheduled for 2024.
Taking Care
The project TAKING CARE - Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care started on October 1, 2019 and places ethnographic and world cultures museums at the centre of the search for possible strategies to address these issues.
Museum Affordances
What do museums afford? What repertoires of action do they make possible? MAA was the lead partner in a 3-year AHRC-funded project to investigate the latent possibilities of museum collections, curatorial interventions and innovative exhibition practices.
Explore the [Re:] Entanglements exhibition >>
Digital Museum of Global Buddhist Cultural Heritage
The Digital Museum of Global Buddhist Cultural Heritage project was hosted by Cambridge Rivers Project (CRP) at MAA. It started in January 2017 and aimed to collect, document, research, and exhibit Asian collections of Buddhist cultural heritage that are in collections worldwide.
Heritage Matters: Culture and Development in the Pacific
This Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded pilot project analysed the current and possible future contribution of Pacific Island museums to sustainable development goals. It was a collaboration between MAA, Solomon Islands National Museum and the Kiribati National Museum and Cultural Centre, also known as Te Umwanibong.
Digital Museum of Global Chinese Kun Opera
The Digital Museum of Global Chinese Kun Opera project was hosted by Cambridge Rivers Project (CRP) at MAA. The project started in October 2016 and aimed to collect, document, research, and exhibit collections of Chinese Kun Opera that are in organisations worldwide.
On the Path of British Missionaries in the Congo
MAA was proud to work with the Congo Great Lakes Initiative (CGLI) during 2016 on this ‘Our Heritage’ project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project involved three workshops between April and August, leading to an exhibition that will open in MAA’s Micro Gallery for Black History Month in October 2016.
Collaborative Work with Torres Strait Islanders
MAA has a long history of working in collaboration with Torres Strait Islanders. The Museum’s collections, which include objects, photographs, drawings and notes, are an important resource for Island Custom. In 2015 the museum was privileged to host award-winning artist Alick Tipoti and the ZUGUBAL dancers from Badu Island, Torres Strait.
Pacific Presences
Oceanic art and European museums European Research Council 2013-2018. This project explored major ethnographic collections that entered European museums during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which remained largely unstudied since.
Multiple Modernisms: Twentieth-Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective
Multiple Modernisms: Twentieth-Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective (Leverhulme Trust 2013-2016). This ambitious project explores what might be called the ‘other histories’ of modernism in art, focusing particularly on indigenous modernisms from Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
Who Cares? Missionary Heritage Network
Britain was one of the most significant sources of missionaries to Africa and the Pacific during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While histories of missionary activity continue to matter to people in these now strongly Christian parts of the world...
The Northcote W. Thomas Project
The Northcote W. Thomas website, funded by the Alborada Trust, explores part of the extraordinary collection made by Northcote Whitridge Thomas in Edo Land, Nigeria, between 1909 and 1913 and held at MAA. It is a continuation of research conducted...
ECLAP (European Collected Library of Artistic Performance)
MAA’s representative collections are accessible on European Collected Library of Artistic Performance (ECLAP) through a two-year research project (2011–13) with support from a grant from the European Commission. Project ECLAP was initiated in 2010 with over 20 European participant countries...
Australian ACCELERATE programme visitors to MAA
MAA hosted two visitors in November who were recipients of Australia’s ACCELLERATE programme for 2013-2014. The programme offers intensive leadership...
Educational and Cultural Exchange with Torres Strait Islander students
Delegation from Tagai State College in front of the Torres Strait display at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on 13 November 2013. Left to right: Curator Anita Herle, Stephen Yamashia, Amelia Mari, Valent Kirk, Margaret Rishbeth (Haddon’s graddaughter), Zach...
Fijian Art Research and Websites
This three-year project, running from May 2011 to April 2014, was a collaboration that aimed to unlock the potential of the outstanding collections of Fijian art, material culture and associated photographs and archives held in museums in the United Kingdom and abroad.
Artefacts of Encounter
Artefacts of Encounter was a 3-year project (April 2010 – March 2013) based at MAA. The research aimed to track down artefacts collected on more than 40 voyages that entered Polynesia between 1765-1840, and to use those artefacts as primar....
Melanesian Art
‘Melanesian art: objects, narratives and indigenous owners’ explored the relationships between a wide range of indigenous art and artefact forms, socially-significant narratives, and the indigenous communities from which historic collections of Melanesian art derive. Focusing on the important but largely...
The Island Catalogue
Over the last twenty years, museums have been diagnosed as instruments of modern western rationality. Ethnographic museums, particularly, have been seen as vehicles of knowledge, classification, and racial theory, theory that needless to say did violence to the Indigenous cultures...
Cambridge Rivers Project
The Cambridge Rivers Project (CRP) was launched in 1983 and is named after one of the founders of modern fieldwork anthropology, W.H.R. Rivers. It is concerned with collecting and conserving information about disappearing worlds and in spreading a knowledge of different cultures through teaching and research.