Julia Nicholson

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Former Pitt Rivers Museum curator Julia Nicholson explains how pioneering women carried out groundbreaking field research in distant parts of the world where they were ‘not meant to travel’ in the early 20th century.

Nicholson says these women coped with illness, shipwreck, loneliness and misogyny to live with distant peoples. They included Barbara Freire-Marreco among Pueblo people in south-western USA, Maria Czaplicka with reindeer herders of Siberia, Beatrice Blackwood in remote villages of Papua New Guinea, Elsie McDougall among textile artists in Mexico and Guatemala, and Ursula Graham Bower in the Naga Hills of north-east India. Nicholson explains how they learned languages, struck bounds across cultural boundaries and documented the lives of the people with whom they worked.

Nicholson was curator and joint head of collections at the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum between 1994 and 2024.

Presented by Bodleian Libraries.