Our Archives and Collections
The Eastern Arc universities are home to outstanding art collections, rare archives and unique repositories.
The radical founding principles of UEA, Essex, Kent and Sussex allowed us to think differently about what should be preserved, and how it should be curated.
We had the freedom to focus on new areas of study, from political cartoons and stand-up comedy, to regional film-making and the art of Latin America. We also had the opportunity to think imaginatively about how objects and artefacts are brought together and displayed in the same space.
By doing so, we enabled our users to consider connections and commonality, the links that tie together our lives and our history, and the differences that highlight the contrasts, clashes and conflicts.
Below are five broad areas of common interest for us. Click on each to explore each area, and the collections they cover. To find out more, contact our specialist archivists and curators via the links that follow.
-
Our collections relating to art, archaeology and architecture are both diverse and significant, and include original art and letters, films and other ephemera relating to the the visual arts, classical history and the built environment.These include the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, an unrivalled collection of Latin American art, Art Nouveau and Construcitivist collections, documentation of modernist architecture, the personal papers of eminent British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, and films and photographs relating to regional and national architecture.
To find out more about our collections, click here.
-
We have always valued the creative and performing arts, and this has been clear in the assessment of our research (through the Research Excellence Framework 2021), which showed that our creative disciplines were all in the upper quartile nationally.Many of our collections focus on these disciplines. They include a unique stand-up comedy archive and collections of theatre playbills, posters, programmes and production notes.
They including the papers of the actor, director and former Chancellor of Sussex, Richard Attenborough.
We also have archives relating to comedy and script-writing, such as the Charlie Higson collection at UEA, and we are home to the East Anglia Film Archive, an invaluable record of both personal and professional film-making in the East of England.
To find out more about our collections, click here.
-
Our universities have nurtured the talents of a number of significant writers; Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, was an undergraduate at Kent and a postgraduate at UEA.But the Eastern Arc universities have also developed writers as diverse as Ben Okri, Sarah Waters, Ian McEwan, Anne Enright and David Mitchell, and have employed writers such as Derek Walcott, WG Sebald, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Giles Foden.
It is only right, then, that we host archives relating to a diverse range of contemporary and historical writers. They include articles, correspondence and manuscripts from writers including Doris Lessing, Margery Allingham, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and May Sinclair, as well as the personal papers of Malcolm Bradbury, who set up the MA in creative writing at UEA.
To explore our collections in full, click here.
-
All three universities are located in regions with a significant agricultural economy, and we work closely with with independent institutes in this area, including the Quadram Institute, John Innes Centre and East Malling Research (NIAB-EMR).This connection with the natural environment is also clear in our archives and collections. from the nature writing of JA Baker (at Essex), Mark Cocker; Roger Deakin and Richard Mabey (at UEA), to the politics of the environment and agriculture, and archives that help us better understand our climate and the way it is changing.
To find out more about our collections, click here.
Photo by John Fielding
-
Many of our collections enable us to better understand the history and politics that have shaped our society.These take many forms, from Mass Observation Archives to the archives of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), from the private library of Lloyd-George to the personal papers of suffragette sisters Annie and Jessie Kenney, the letters of TE Lawrence, and the British Cartoon Archive, whose holdings display a contempoary commentary on historic events and culture.
We also hold significant papers testifying to oppression, persection and resistance, many of which reflect the lives of civilians who resist oppressive regimes, such as anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and the French Resistance in WW2.
To find out more about our collections relating to society and politics, click here.
Contact
To find out about each university’s collections, click on the links below or contact them directly via the emails given.