Chris Wingfield

Chris was born in South Africa, but has lived in the UK since the mid-1980s. He wrote a Ba dissertation on Interpreting Iron in Zimbabwe and an M.Phil thesis on Ostrich Egghell Beads, the Environment and Sociality in the Kalahari. His PhD (undertaken part-time) tracked the The Moving Objects of the London Missionary Society.

He has worked on a number of museum and collections research projects, including:

• The Relational Museum Project (Pitt Rivers collections 1884-1945)
• The Donald Thomson Collection Project (Arnhem Land, 1935-1943)
• The Vibes project (musical connections between West Africa, the West Indies and the West Midlands)
• The Other Within Project, (Pitt Rivers Museum English collections)
• Who Cares? The material heritage of British missions in Africa and the Pacific, and its future (together with Karen Jacobs) 
• Museum Affordances (PI: Paul Basu, culminating in the [Re:]Entanglements exhibition on Northcote Thomas collections)
• Making Things from Animals: Leather Technologies of the Kalahari (British Museum Endangered Material Knowledge Project)

During 2017 Chris held a South African National Research Foundation fellowship for UK researchers at the University of Cape Town’s Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative. 

In September 2018 Chris joined the Sainsbury Research Unit.

Prior to coming to the SRU, Chris was a Curator at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (2012-2018) and Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery (2004-2006). He has also been a Researcher at the University of Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum (2002 & 2006-9) and was an Associate Lecturer at the Open University (2009-2013). He has also taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

Having undertaken fieldwork in southern Africa, England, northern Australia and Jamaica, his research emerges from the intersection of a number of disciplinary and scholarly traditions.

Chris is particularly interested in the history of museums and collections, with a particular focus on missionary and anthropological collections and the ways these related historically to the production of images. 

In 2024 he was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to complete an experimental digital-first monograph engaging with these themes, Argonauts of the Eastern Atlantic: Artefactual Histories of the London Missionary Society.

At UEA, I regular teach on the following modules:

• Makers and Making (Ba - Year 1)
• Art in the Contemporary World (Ba - Year 2)
• Lives of Objects (Ba - Year 2)
• Race and Visual Culture Across Atlantic Worlds (Ba - Year 3)
• The Arts and Archaeology of Africa (Ma)