My practice-based PhD explores the objects and archives of Leicester Museum and Art Gallery’s Dryad craftworks collection, with the aim to illuminate what linkages with the global and imperial context this new material culture history can reveal, and how it relates to museum studies and practice today. The collection is extremely diverse in manufacture and global in scope, ranging from basketry to textiles, wooden objects, decorated coconuts, and raw materials. The objects circulated in international exhibitions and missionary expositions between 1907 and 1936, and come from Britain and Eastern Europe as well as British colonies in America, Australia, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. For this reason, the collection represents a case study to examine global and colonial collecting at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how contemporary exhibitions fostered European imperial culture.

‘Global Leicester’ seeks to generate substantial new research to explore what the Dryad collection reveals about the linkages between Leicester and Empire, and about changing understandings of Empire over the twentieth century. With a networking approach, I explore why and how the collector Harry Peach gathered specific objects, I investigate their provenance and manufacture, how the objects travelled to Leicester, and what their past curation and display say about changing post-colonial environments and relationships.

The project will contribute to three key areas of historical enquiry. First, it will offer a new material culture history of the British Empire, through analysis of a little-known but voluminous and important national collection of imperial objects. Second, it will offer a means of changing current meanings and interpretations of the Dryad objects, by foregrounding the history of Empire in their development and interpretation. Third, it will build on and contribute to the dynamic field of global material culture history and histories of imperial collecting and display, by tracking a diverse and understudied collection through its hitherto unused set of archives in UK and abroad.

As part of my research, I am working with the collections department at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery to understand the rationale behind the collection. New insights will bring a different perspective on the use and interpretation of the Dryad objects today, encouraging good practice based on the history of the collection, and considering matters of mission and cultural value within the institution. The aim is to give new light and life to the objects, which are kept in storage. The final outcome will be not only the thesis, but also an exhibition on – and with – the Dryad collection, emphasizing aspects related to the global and imperial context in local collecting.

I am currently running an object-focused blog with stories about the Dryad collection www.leicestermuseums.org/news/dryad-collection-introduction