Annual William Fagg Lecture 2026 – Prof. Marsha Pearce

Professor Marsha Pearce discusses ethnographic and colonial meanings of the “field” and how Caribbean art and objects frame museums through belonging and agency.

The lecture considers “the field” both as a space for anthropological study and as the colonial sugarcane field, and connects those meanings to the histories of museums. Drawing on Caribbean artworks and objects, it reframes how the field is seen through questions of belonging and agency. Marsha Pearce is a British Academy Global Professor at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, and a visual culture scholar at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine.