Louise Tythacott
Lecturer in Museology
School of Arts, Histories and Cultures
Phone: 0161 275 3328
Email: louise.tythacott@manchester.ac.uk
Full Profile
Research profile
Louise is a Lecturer in Museology at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the collecting, representation and display of non-Western objects in museums, and she is particularly interested in the interpretation of Chinese material culture.
Originally trained as an anthropologist, Louise's post-graduate research was based at the University of Hong Kong (1990-1) where she undertook fieldwork on Buddhist and Daoist temple imagery. She worked in the museum field for over a decade, initially as a curator in a Burmese textile museum, then as an exhibitions officer at The Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery & Museums, Brighton (1992-1996). In 1996 Louise took up the post of curator of ethnology, later, head of ethnology, at Liverpool Museum (part of the National Museums Liverpool), where she was the lead curator for a major suite of galleries devoted to World Cultures, which opened in 2005.
Louise has published on topics relating to anthropology and art, the modernist avant-garde and the museum, the formation of ethnographic collections and the re-conceptualisations of Chinese objects in the West. Her monograph, Surrealism and the Exotic (Routledge, 2003), explored the Surrealist's shifting perceptions of non-Western objects and examined the close proximity between Surrealism and the burgeoning world of anthropology in France in the early decades of the twentieth century.
In 2006 Louise was awarded an AHRC grant to investigate the representation of Chinese objects in British museums. She is presently completing a book - The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display - which explores the biographies of a group of rare Buddhist deity figures taken from China by a British soldier during the First Opium War (1839-42). The bronze sculptures were re-conceptualised in various exhibitionary realms - the Great Exhibition (1851), the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857), Joseph Mayer's Egyptian Museum (1856-1867) and Liverpool Museum (1867-today). Using Kopytoff's (1986) notion of the biography of objects as a framework, the research charts the changing meanings ascribed to the statues as they pass through multiple spheres of representation. Their careers illustrate the complex and uneasy ways in which Chinese objects have been classified in the West, and their appropriation by a soldier in the aftermath of a brutal war raises questions about restitution.
Louise's future research will focus on the biographical trajectories of key objects taken during the Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-1860) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) in China. The work will be based on archival research, mainly in regimental museums in the UK.
Supervision Areas
- The collection, classification and representation of Chinese and Asian artefacts in museums.
- The aestheticisation of non-Western objects and the politics of representing ethnographic collections in museums.
- Colonialism and collecting.
- Material culture, identity and restitution, particularly in relation to Chinese objects.
- Chinese Buddhist deity iconography.
- Surrealism and non-Western art.
Current and Former PhD students
- Emma Poulter (2008) The West African Collections at Manchester Museum
- Maria Sklirou (2009) The Issue of Access in Greek Museums
- Alan Arcadia (2009) An Intimate Destruction: Desire, Death and the Self in Buddhism, Surrealism and Georges Bataille
- Ann French (since 2004) Archaeologists as Collectors: the Greek Embroidery Collecting of R.M. Dawkins and A.J.B Wace
Select list of publications
Monographs
- Tythacott, L. Surrealism and the Exotic, London: Routledge, 2003.
- Tythacott, L. The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display, Berghahn, 2010. Forthcoming.
Selected articles
- Tythacott, L. 'Curiosity', 'Antiquity', 'Art Treasure' and 'Commodity': Collecting Buddhist Deity Figures in Mid-nineteenth Century England', Journal of the Museum Ethnographers Group No. 23, 2010. Forthcoming.
- Tythacott, L. 'The Politics of Representation in Museums', in Bates and Niles Maack (eds) Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd ed., New York: Taylor Francis, 2009.
- Tythacott, L. 'Sacred Island Deities', in Apollo, Vol CLXIX, No. 563, London: Press Holdings Ltd, pp 90-97, March 2009.
- Tythacott, L. 'From the Fetish to the Specimen: the Ridyard African Collection at Liverpool Museum 1895-1916' in Shelton, (ed), Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other, Horniman Museum, pp 157-179, 2001.
- Tythacott, L. 'Souvenirs of the Travelling Surrealists' in Hitchcock and Teague (eds) Souvenirs: The Material Culture of Tourism, Ashgate, pp 72-77, 2000
- Tythacott, L. 'A Convulsive Beauty: Surrealism, Oceania and African Art', Journal of the Museum Ethnographers Group, No. 11, March 1999, pp 43-53, 2000.
- Tythacott, L. 'The Theatre of the Incorporeal', in Benewick and Donald (eds) Belief in China: Art and Politics; Deities and Mortality, Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery & Museums, Brighton, pp 19-27, 1995.