Centre for African Art and Archaeology

Promoting the arts and archaeology of Africa

In October 2009, the University of East Anglia established a Centre for African Art and Archaeology to reflect the strong convergence of research and teaching interests related to Africa and to promote the arts and archaeology of the continent.

Currently, seven members of the Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU) and Art History and World Art Studies and belong to the Centre, with primary research interests in the visual and material culture of Africa. African arts also play a major role in the collections of the Sainsbury Centre, which share the School's home in the Norman Foster-designed Sainsbury Centre building.

The Centre for African Art and Archaeology coordinates this assemblage of interests, bringing together the activities of staff and students to foster the development of research and teaching on the arts, archaeology, and cultural heritage of the African continent.

Find out more and follow us on our Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter) profiles for the latest updates and details of how to join.

The schedule of speakers, which will involve a mix of online (Zoom) and in-person events, will be uploaded soon. Below this you can find a brief profile of the researchers involved in the Centre.

Registration for in-person attendance to TAG has closed. However, registration for online attendance is still on.

People

Director
Professor Anne Haour FBA FSA, an archaeologist who focuses on the archaeology of Africa, has conducted excavations in Niger and in Bénin exploring the creation and maintenance of boundaries, the interrelation of archaeological and historical data in descriptions of 'empires', and the materialisation of contacts through artefacts. More recently, she developed these questions in a research project tracking the routes by which cowrie shells came to West Africa from the western Indian Ocean.
This involved excavation in the Maldives and the study of pottery of Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern origin; the book presenting the results was published in late 2021. She has also researched topics relating to present-day Africa, such as religion and identity among Hausa communities or depictions of the continent in schools and the media. In 2023, she and Clarke co-hosted a conference at the intersection of climate change and heritage, building on their earlier joint work on the impact of coastal erosion and climate change on heritage and livelihoods.
Secretary
Aisha Babaji Muhammad is an MA student at the Sainsbury Research Uni t for the Arts of Africa Oceania and the Americas with a focus on the Arts of Africa. She received her bachelor’s degree in Archaeology and Heritage Studies from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. Aisha is interested in pursuing further research involving the archaeology and heritage of Africa.
Secretary
Dr Chris Wingfield has previously worked at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. His current research, 'Re-collecting the Missionary Road', focuses on the material culture of the southern African interior during the nineteenth century. Chris is also a co-Investigator on a major AHRC grant Museum Affordances, led by Paul Basu at SOAS. This is focused on the collections made by Northcote Thomas, first government anthropologist in Nigeria, and their significance and potential today.
Secretary
Dr Gabriella Nugent is an art historian specialising in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on questions around colonial and decolonial histories in Africa, transnationalism and the politics of representation in our current age of globalisation. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in UEA's Department of Art History and World Art Studies. Her first book, Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Leuven University Press, 2021), examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo.
Secretary
Professor Jo Clarke is based in the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is an archaeologist with extensive fieldwork experience in Western Sahara, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Gaza. She researches the archaeology of marginal environments. Her current research focuses on mobile communities and early agriculturalists in arid and marginal environments and particularly where it pertains to their responses and adaptations to climatic change. She is a contributing author to the heritage section of the Africa chapter for the upcoming IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
Secretary
Professor John Mack FBA (emeritus) was formerly Keeper of the Ethnography Department of the British Museum and Director of the Museum of Mankind. He was President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa from 2005-2011.  His research has focused on Congo, South Sudan, Kenya and the islands of the western Indian Ocean (especially Madagascar) taking a broadly anthropological approach to art, material culture and archaeology. Recent books have discussed questions of memory and art (2003), the process of miniaturisation (2007), experiences of the sea (2011) and the relationship between art and death in sub-Saharan Africa (2019). He is currently working on a comparative study of coastal cultures including chapters on the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean coasts of Africa.
Secretary
Dr Nick Brooks is an environmental scientist who specialises in human-environment interactions and human adaptation to climate change. He combines consultancy work on climate change and human development with research into how human societies responded and adapted to past rapid and severe changes in climate, with a focus on the Middle Holocene period.
This research focuses on how the reorganisation of the global climate between about 6400 and 5000 years ago may have influenced cultural trajectories in the northern hemisphere subtropics and contributed to the emergence of the world's earliest civilisations. Nick’s research and publications explore how our understanding of past human-environment interactions can inform contemporary responses to climate change, through adaptation ‘on the ground’ and by the challenging norms, values, worldviews and ideologies that both drive emissions-intensive activities and vulnerability to climate change. Nick co-directs the Western Sahara Project with Joanne Clarke, and conducted field-based research into the archaeology and past environments of Western Sahara between 2002 and 2009. Prior to that he conducted geoarchaeological work in the Fezzan region of Libya. Nick has a PhD in climatology from UEA's Climatic Research Unit, which examined the links between climate change, land use and drought in the African Sahel. Much of Nick’s consultancy work is focused on Africa, and recent collaborative research has addressed the implications of climate change for tangible and intangible African heritage.
Secretary
Dr Simon Dell is an art historian of the visual culture of the early twentieth century, with a special interest in photography; he has written a number of works addressing the relations between freedom, oppression and representation. His most recent book considers photography and subjectivity in the colonial context: 'The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography between France and Africa, 1900-1939' (Leuven University Press, 2020). He is currently completing a book about Communism.

Students

Here is an introduction to some of our fantastic Africanist PhD students, part of our postgraduate researcher community.

Abdulmalik Abdulrahman Abdulmalik Abdulmalik is an AHRC CHASE doctoral researcher at the prestigious Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, University of East Anglia. The focus of his current research pertains to the reconstruction of the interactions and entanglements between West African communities and Europeans within the context of the historical era along the Atlantic Ocean. His BA and first MA were in Archaeology from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria, and his second master's degree in Anthropology was fully funded by the Hermione Waterfield and Sainsbury Research Unit Funds at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, University of East Anglia. He previously held the position of a tutor specialising in heritage studies and a research assistant within the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria. He has contributed to various research projects as a researcher and field assistant, resulting in the publication of numerous academic articles and conference papers in Nigeria and abroad.
Benjamina Efua Dadzie is a researcher with interest in West African cultures, especially Akan and Yoruba. In her work she explores agency and representation. Her current research is centred on Abeokuta (in southwestern Nigeria) and its 19th century missionary past. She is a AHRC CHASE-funded PhD student at the Sainsbury Research Unit. Benjamina has formerly worked as Collections Assistant in Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, and Research and Collections Officer at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen in The Netherlands.
Claire McGee is a postgraduate researcher with an interdisciplinary interest in global material and visual cultures. Her research concentrates on the documented experience of the Marock subculture, on social media, during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the visual archive which has been produced during this time. In the Marock subculture, originating from Botswana, members style themselves with a distinctive heavy metal aesthetic drawing on cowboy imagery, with some parallels elsewhere on the continent. Her thesis demonstrates how the members of the Marock subculture use costuming, and performance to empower themselves, creating meaningful identities, and a strong sense of community; and how their adopted Wild West aesthetics recognise their familial background in cattle-herding, playing an important role in the self-fashioning of the subculture. This research aims to develop the study of visual and material culture in Botswana, at the same time challenging some long-standing images of Africa. More widely, her research touches on themes such as subcultural identities, costuming and performance; death and commemoration; as well as social media.
Deborah Dainese is a CHASE-DTP-funded Ph.D. candidate researching the art, inculturation, and Catholic missions in the mid-Twentieth century in Kwango, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She is particularly interested in Congolese colonial and post-colonial art (with special attention to sculpture), Catholic archives, and missionary exhibitions. She holds Masters degrees from the Sainsbury Research Unit and from the University of Padua. Her professional experience includes working in the curatorial team of the Diocesan Museum of Vicenza, from 2017 to 2019.
Elia Quesada-Martínez is a PhD researcher with a background in History of Art and Archaeology. From 2009, she became specialised in prehistoric rock art research and documentation with cutting-edge technologies in World Heritage sites, along the Levantine Spanish Basin, and Western Sahara. Her research focuses on the study and analysis of Western Sahara graphical prehistoric manifestations, as an expression of cultural values, ideologies and socio-economic adaptation strategies to past environmental changes of communities in this area, and their potential interactions with other regional and trans-Saharan contexts. Her research is a supplementary part to Nick Brooks and Joanne Clark´s Western Sahara Project and fills an important gap in the scarce archaeological research of a very depleted territory by armed conflicts. Other areas of her interest include training programs for archaeological heritage digitisation, awareness and self-management in marginal local communities.
Na'ankwat Kwapnoe-Dakup is a PhD researcher in the Sainsbury Research Unit, funded by the Robert Sainsbury Scholarship and a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, University of Jos, Nigeria where she taught archaeology and heritage courses at undergraduate level. Her current research synergises scientific methods and local knowledge to understand human perception of archaeology and the landscape it sits upon in the Kofyar area of the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria. This builds on her long-term ethnoarchaeological research in the area including a BA project and MA research. She's interested in landscape archaeology, community/public archaeology, cultural heritage, ceramics and field archaeology.
Novelette-Aldoni Stewart is conducting research on leather technologies in the 19th century Kalahari, with specific reference to the peoples who inhabited the region, their technological and manufacturing know-how, the socio-political and cultural dynamics within the regions at that time, and objects collected along the missionary road. This research is a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the British Museum: Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, with funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This ties in more broadly into her interest in the research and the conservation of non-European material culture. Prior to her doctoral research, she received her MSc in Conservation from University College London's Institute of Archaeology. Her degrees earned in the United States include a MA in Arts Administration from New York University, and a master’s degree in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Her professional experience spans 25 years in the UK as well as in various foreign countries, working in different capacities – cultural researcher, curator, object conservator and collections care expert -- for a range of museums, cultural organisations, stakeholders, and source communities.