Dr Sandra Dudley
+44 (0) 116 252 3970
shd3@le.ac.uk
I joined the School of Museum Studies in September 2003. I am Programme Director of the distance learning MA in Interpretation, Representation & Heritage and the School's Exhibitions and Collections Director. I am also Chief Co-Editor of Berghahn's forthcoming new annual journal in museum studies, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.
I did my doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, and have conducted anthropological field research with Karenni refugees (from Burma) living in camps on the northwestern border of Thailand since 1996. I worked for over ten years in various curatorial (mainly collections management) and research capacities at the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, held postdoctoral positions at the Pitt Rivers Museum and at Queen Elizabeth House, and am a former Graduate Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. I have made major field collections of contemporary textiles from Thailand and Burma for the Pitt Rivers Museum and Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, and conducted a major research project into Burmese textiles in collections in UK and US museums. I have also consulted on various refugee, museum and publishing projects.
Teaching
I developed and run the School's ground-breaking MA in Interpretation, Representation & Heritage, and teach on material culture across the campus-based Museum Studies and Art Museum and Gallery Studies programmes and the distance learning Museum Studies course. I also developed the special option module, World Arts/Museum Ethnography, available to campus MA students.
Areas for supervision
I currently supervise and welcome research students in a range of areas including:
- Material culture and materiality
- Wellbeing, aesthetics, perception and sensory experience
- Cross-cultural interpretation and curation
- Dress and textiles
- Cultural and political identities and practice in relation to material and visual culture and migration/exile
- Representational and interpretive issues in or beyond museums, particularly with regard to ethnographic ('world art') or folklore or indigenous museums and collections, or dress and textiles
- Phenomenological and other philosophical theories of material culture and 'heritage' (including their potential application in such areas as collections management).
