Collection-based Research in the Humanities Grant for the College Archives and the Skilliter Centre

Newnham College Archives and the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies have secured a Collection-based Research in the Humanities Grant from the Isaac Newton Trust to digitise four photograph albums as part of the research project Rural Anatolia through Foreign Eyes. 

 

This project is a collaboration between the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies Research Library & Archives and Newnham College Archive. It includes the digitisation of two photograph albums belonging to archaeologist Winifred Lamb (1894-1963), covering her time on a dig in the village of Kusura, Afyonkarahisar Province, Turkey between 1935 and 1937, and a further two albums of photographs and newscuttings from the Anglo-Turkish Relief Committee, which record fundraising involving Lamb’s associate archaeologist Professor John Garstang (1876-1956) and include photographs of the British campaign to send financial and material support to Turkey after the Erzincan earthquake of 1939. 

Funding from the Isaac Newton Trust supports the Skilliter Centre’s Academic Advisor, Prof. Dr. Ebru Boyar, to visit Cambridge from Ankara and run two workshops, one based in Newnham College Archives and focusing on interactions between British archaeologists and their Turkish colleagues; the other in the Skilliter Centre Research Library & Archives concentrating on British archaeologists’ role in fundraising for Turkish earthquake relief. The evidence of work by foreign archaeologists – from captioned photographs to organised fundraising, and from murder mysteries to exhibited artefacts – offers insight into the relationship between Britain and Turkey in this period and the role that excavation and antiquarianism played in efforts at public diplomacy during the Second World War.