Decolonizing Collections: The Reception and Consumption of Classical Casts in Pedagogy in the British Empire

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This project aims at providing for the first time an important and much-needed historical insight into the import,dissemination and role of plaster casts from the antique, as teaching materials and means of faithful representations ofabsent classical works, in pedagogic collections and visual displays of the Indian subcontinent. No different to displaced or"stolen" artefacts in modern museums, casts of classical sculpture, when found in postcolonial environments, areinextricably connected to imperialism narratives: their use and display will illuminate the role of the diffusion of the westernideal in art - through the use of Greek and Roman sculptures - in the implementation of 19th and early 20th centuriescolonial/imperial cultural policies.The project will be based in the Cast Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, one of the finest and best preserved in the UnitedKingdom, and one that is fully grounded in both the teaching culture and collecting practice that determined the set of caststo be sent abroad in 19th c. academia. It will benefit from the interdisciplinary supervision of one of the world experts in thereception of Classical culture in India, and of the partnership with the collection of casts of the Faculty of Visual Arts of theUniversity of Performing and Visual Arts at Colombo (Sri Lanka). It will ultimately have a major impact on initiatives in thedecolonization of both the Ashmolean's collections and the Classics curriculum, and insert an often-neglected category ofmuseum objects into current international debates on colonialism, imperialism and nationalism.