Daisy-Alys Vaughan

• Archaeology, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University
• Email: d.v.c.vaughan1@newcastle.ac.uk

The Shefton Archive – Enhancing a Collection’s History through Object Biographies: Professor Brian Shefton, a leading Classical archaeologist, established a collection of almost 1,000 Greek and Etruscan artefacts, now displayed in the Great North Museum, Newcastle, and seen by 450,000 visitors a year. The collection is unique in having an intact archive which contains documents detailing Shefton’s collecting and research between 1955 and 2012. Using the archive, this interdisciplinary project aims to develop new insights into how and why the collection was established and developed. The figured Greek vases in the museum collection will be used as a case-study to create object biographies, tracing the varying contexts and uses of the artefacts within antiquity, the more recent past and the present. In particular, this project will explore the potential of the archive as a lens for interpreting artefacts and re-imagining the collection’s capacity to engage museum audiences with diverse, and possibly conflicting, narratives of archaeological collecting. By experimenting with museum re-display and digital object biographies, this PhD intends to provoke public discussion of the collection and curation histories of Greek vases and to assess how object biographies can reveal contested histories and hidden narratives to challenge museum audiences.

Supervisory Team: Dr Sally Waite, Archaeology (Newcastle), Dr Areti Galani, Arts and Cultures (Newcastle), Andrew Parkin, (TWAM).

Start Date: October 2018