The Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU), based in the Sainsbury Centre at UEA, is a centre for the study of the arts and material culture of Africa, the Pacific region and the Americas.
It has six permanent academic faculty supported by library and administrative staff. Visiting fellows, research associates and postdoctoral researchers working on special projects also contribute to the academic life of the SRU.
It has its own teaching and study facilities and a specialist research library known as the Robert Sainsbury Library, all on hand in the Sainsbury Centre.
Our courses
The SRU offers MA and PhD degrees, with generous scholarships and funding support for students. MRes and MPhil options are available.
It also offers visiting fellowships for postdoctoral scholars and hosts regular conferences, symposia and other academic meetings.
The MA and PhD programmes are intended for those interested in careers in higher education, museums and galleries, publishing, journalism and development.
Our research and teaching
Combining anthropological, art-historical, archaeological and museological approaches, SRU research and teaching are focused on the distinctive cultures of the three regions.
It has a particular focus on how artworks and objects are made, used and circulated – in effect, how they matter to people, both in their original contexts and in the contexts of museums and exhibitions.
As part of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UEA the SRU contributes to a substantial and lively scholarly community in the Sainsbury Centre.
Our people
Events and News
We are excited to invite everyone to our upcoming seminar on Friday, 21 June. Nancy Um, Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation at the Getty Research Institute will be presenting on Digging, Reading, and Looking: Approaches and Authority in Indian Ocean Material Culture History.
This event can be attended in person or online. Those of you in Norwich are most welcome to join us for a free of charge buffet provided by CfAAA at the Unthank Arms afterward.
Venue: Elizabeth Fry 01.02
Time: 5 pm - 6 pm (local time)
Link to register to follow: https://tinyurl.com/3azcf4ut
Abstract: The late seventeenth-century inventory of Margrieta van Varick of New York presents the far reaching impact of prized early modern goods, such as painted cotton textiles from India, Chinese porcelain, and carpets made in Turkey. This document also presents a salient methodological pivot point, inviting both textual and material readings, thereby opening the way for divergent registers of art historical and archaeological argumentation. In this talk, I will use this inventory as a locus for discussion about how scholars of the Indian Ocean posit authority and construct the meaning of objects in early modern oceanic circulatory cultures.
Biography: Nancy Um is Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation at the Getty Research Institute. Nancy is the author of The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009) and Shipped but not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during Yemen's Age of Coffee (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2017), in addition to other studies about trade, art, diplomacy, and gift exchange around the early modern Indian Ocean rim.