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 and Kent 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.
We are immensely proud of what we have achieved in bringing together our collections, and are indebted to those benefactors who have shared our vision and made significant donations.
As part of the work of Eastern Arc, we are exploring opportunities to widen and simplify access to these resources for all of those working and studying at our universities, and to enable those within our region to learn about and engage with the special collections we curate.
In time we hope to provide a single portal so that users can discover our digitised collections under one virtual roof. In the meantime this page offers a series of thematic windows that give light to the riches within via the drop-down headings below. You can also read case studies showing the ways different parts of our collections have been used by researchers and the public.
Archives and Special Collections Group
To guide us in this work, we have a group of colleagues who direct, advocate and facilitate joint working across the Consortium.
As part of its work, the group put in place a strategy: ‘Empower the East’.
Contact
To find out about each university’s collections, click on the links below or contact them directly via the emails given.
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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.
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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 2014), 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.
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.
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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 from the life and work of Doris Lessing (above), the artwork and correspondence of Margery Allingham, letters from JD Salinger, books and first editions inscribed by TS Eliot, and the personal papers of Malcolm Bradbury, who set up the MA in creative writing at UEA.
To explore our collections in full, click here.
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One of Eastern Arc’s four thematic priorities is ‘Sustainability, Natural Resources and Food.’ 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
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Many of our collections enable us to better understand the history and politics that have shaped our society.These take many forms, from the archives of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and 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.
To find out more about our collections relating to society and politics, click here.