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'Antique Dealers' research project awarded AHRC funding

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'Antique Dealers: the British Antiques Trade in the 20th Century (a cultural geography)' has recently been awarded funding by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), one of the leading funding bodies in the UK.

The project is based in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, and is in collaboration with the University of Southampton.  Museum partners include Temple Newsam House (Leeds Museums and Galleries), The Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This will be the first time that the history of the modern antiques trade has been subject to sustained academic study. The project will document, map, contextualize and critically analyze the antique trade as it has evolved and developed in Britain in the 20th century. The cultural geography of the trade in antiques in a British context will be analyzed, with consideration to its international dimensions and the relationships to the European and North American markets.

Principal Investigator, Dr Mark Westgarth (University of Leeds), says of the ‘Antique Dealers’ project:

‘Part of the catalyst for the project has been the rapid transformation of the antiques trade over the last few years of the 20th century. The late 20th century has been a turbulent time for much of the trade, with many high profile dealers retiring, or significantly modifying their trading practices. As part of the research objectives, the project will undertake an ethnographic study, interviewing many retired, semi-retired and working dealers. The result of these interviews will form an oral history archive, which will be made available via an interactive project website.

‘As well as these web-based and oral history archive outputs, the Antique Dealers project team will hold a public Conference focused on the history of the antiques trade, to take place towards the conclusion of the project in Spring 2016 at Temple Newsam House in Leeds. There will also be an edited volume of essays arising from the project.’

The project runs for 30 months from September 2013.

For more information, please see the project website.