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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Dr Charlotte Bates

Academic Profile

My Fellowship is associated with the Mellon-Sawyer seminars Human creativity: ecologies and practices of invention, a series of events I have organised together with Professors Sarah Whatmore (Oxford, Geography) and Chris Gosden (Oxford, Archaeology), involving international visiting scholars and Oxford academics working collectively through the mediations of objects selected from the University's museum collections. In connection with the seminar series I am currently researching human-object relationships behind the scenes at two museums, the Pitt Rivers Museum, which houses over half a million ethnographic and archaeological objects, and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, home to the University's scientific collections of zoological, entomological, geological, and mineralogical specimens. The study focuses on life behind the scenes at the museums, and aims to investigate the interface between cultural and natural worlds through artefacts and specimens.

From February to August 2012 I will also be working with the Pitt Rivers Museum as a consultant on the Designation Development Fund project Small blessings: animating the Pitt Rivers' amulet collections. During this time I will be conducting research on selected amulets from a major collection of religious and folkloric amulets collected by the French ethnologist Adrien de Mortillet more than a century ago and acquired by Henry Wellcome before its transfer to Oxford.

Before joining the School of Geography and the Environment I studied for a PhD in visual sociology at Goldsmiths. My thesis, Vital bodies: a visual sociology of health and illness in everyday life, addressed theoretical and methodological concerns to embody sociology.

Publications