Archival Research on South and Southeast Asia: Accounts from the Field

The Yale University Art Gallery holds almost 300,000 works of art, tens of thousands of which are from South and Southeast Asia. In this talk, Ruth Barnes and Arielle Winnik discuss how objects in museum collections serve as scholarly archives.

The talk will take place in “Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textiles,” a sweeping exhibition that celebrates the elaborate textile heritage of Indonesia and explores the ancient interisland links found in this vast maritime region. The exhibition features textiles not just from Indonesia and Sarawak (Malaysia), but from India as well, preserved in Indonesia for long periods of time.

This talk is the latest in a series begun last semester by Yale’s Librarian for South & Southeast Asian Studies. By good fortune, a previously scheduled Javanese gamelan performance will be held at YUAG at 5:30 PM after the talk ends.