Oxford Quarter
Academic Overview
Course Lead: Dr. Sydney Stewart Rose
The Oxford term situates students within the historic heart of British museology. Building directly on the Cape Town themes, the Oxford BOSP term invites critical reflection on the colonial foundations of Western museums and the role of activism, collaboration, and restitution in reshaping them. Students will examine the entanglement of empire and knowledge, and consider how institutions like the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ashmolean Museum are reinterpreting their collections in dialogue with formerly colonised communities.
A crucial connective thread is Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), the movement linking South African and British universities in questioning institutional memory, monumental heritage, and the legacies of empire.
Seminars are paired with on-site teaching at major and community museums in Oxford. Research tutorials guide students to a major research project culminating in a 6,000 word dissertation. Students are encouraged to engage in comparative learning for this dissertation by linking a South African case study to an Oxford-based collection or site, however, the topic of this research component will ultimately be chosen in consultation with the tutor.
Major Research Project
Building on the Cape Town (CT) program, the Oxford counterpart takes advantage of the opportunity for comparative analysis, with the major research project focusing on how African collections are represented in the Imperial metropole compared to how they were represented in CT and the implications of these differences. At the start of term, students will choose a collection or museological project which is physically accessible to them and will enjoy fieldwork experiences and site visits with materials connected to the collection of their choice. This might include:
- The anti-apartheid movement archives at the Bodleian libraries
- Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) photographic collections depicting CT
- South African Stone Age collections at British Museum (BM)
- Benin materials at PRM and BM
- Rhodes house archives on history of leprosy in the British Empire
- Maasai “Living Cultures” project at PRM
- Natural history collections and biological samples for modern scientific research
1. The Universal Museum
This theme introduces students to the intellectual and political foundations of the “universal museum,” a model that emerged from Enlightenment ideas about world knowledge, scientific classification, and cosmopolitan stewardship. Working with institutions such as the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, and the British Museum, students analyse how universal museums organise global cultures through taxonomies and display strategies that reflect and sometimes reproduce colonial hierarchies. In dialogue with their earlier work in Cape Town, students will consider how different national contexts contest claims to universality and envision more ethical, collaborative, and accountable futures for global collections.
- “Labelling Matters” project at the PRM
- Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums
- Bénédicte Savoy, Africa's Struggle for its Art
2. REimagination and Repair
While the CT secondary theme considers the role of imagination in filling archival gaps with creative responses, the Oxford theme turns toward REimagination and the deliberate reworking of museum environments, narratives, and power structures. Rather than treating gaps as absences that must be filled, REimagination asks how institutions can work with these gaps, acknowledging uncertainty, refusing false completeness, and allowing silences to speak to histories of violence, dispossession, and institutional forgetting.
Students explore how activism, collaboration, and creative practice actively reshape institutions of memory. This includes examining restitution processes, grassroots activism campaigns and long-term partnerships with source communities, which challenge the material and symbolic legacies of empire. Equally important is understanding how disciplinary boundaries between art, anthropology, history, and science are materially enacted within museums, and how artists, scholars, and community groups intervene to disrupt these inherited divisions. Using case studies, students learn how REimagination enables museums to become dynamic, self-critical, and ethically responsive sites of public memory.
- Oriel College and RMF
- The 4 disciplinary museums of Oxford
- Haida Gwaii Great Box project at PRM
- Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
- Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor”
Program Outcomes
By the end of the program, students will:
- Demonstrate comparative understanding of museum theory and practice in postcolonial and post-imperial contexts.
- Critically engage with questions of representation, restitution, and the politics of heritage.
- Develop original research linking collections and curatorial practices across the global South and North.
- Articulate informed, ethical, and imaginative responses to the contemporary challenges of museums and public memory.