Professor Michèle Mendelssohn awarded TORCH-Pitt Rivers Museum KE Fellowship

We're delighted to announce that Professor Michèle Mendelssohn has been awarded the TORCH-Pitt Rivers Museum Knowledge Exchange Fellowship.

Dr Chris Morton, Head of Research at Pitt Rivers Museum, said: “We are delighted to be welcoming Professor Michèle Mendelssohn as a TORCH-Pitt Rivers Museum Knowledge Exchange Fellow this autumn to work in conjunction with our current Beyond the Binary project colleagues on the fascinating and important project, 'Queer students of colour at Oxford from 1900 to the present day’. We look forward to working with her and to sharing the outputs of her project with our various audiences.”

Beyond the Binary: Queering and Questioning Collections and Displays at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Thanks to a new grant to the Pitt Rivers Museum by the Heritage Lottery fund, the project will work with local, national and international partners to explore the global diversity of sexual and gender identities.

Working with a broad range of partners, from researchers to community activists, the project will challenge historical interpretations of the museum’s collections – offering alternative understandings from people with different identities, as well as identifying human histories that are unrepresented as a result of intolerance. This is so that no individual or group feels excluded from the museum because of their sexuality or gender, and so that all visitors – however they might identify themselves – can understand humanity better.

In addition to exploring the existing collections, this project will include a community-focussed acquisition programme for LGBTQ+ cultural and historical artefacts. Objects will be collected from British communities and across the globe that highlight traditions of gender non-conformity, bringing British LGBTQ+ heritage into conversation with global LGBTQ+ material culture.