Donna Yates receives major ERC grant

Published: 3 September 2018

Dr Donna Yates, a Lecturer in Sociology whose research focuses in looting and trafficking of antiquities and cultural property and art crime, has won a €1.5m ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant

Dr Donna Yates, a Lecturer in Sociology whose research focuses in looting and trafficking of antiquities and cultural property and art crime, has won a €1.5m ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant.Donna Yates & TRex

This is the same funding scheme that founded Dr Yates's Trafficking Culture Project which was the subject of a major Hunterian Museum exhibition in 2015.

Dr Yates’s five-year project will explore the role that objects play within transnational criminal networks, exploring the broad question “Can objects cause crimes?”

Using methodologies for understanding the relationships between objects and people, and how networks form from these relationships, Dr Yates and her team will follow the pathways of what they’ve termed “criminogenic collectables”: objects of desire and collecting that seem to, at times, inspire crime. Specifically, they will be looking at the movements of cultural objects, fossils, and collectable rare wildlife starting in the Americas, the South Pacific, and Africa.

Donna’s team includes Professor Simon Mackenzie of the Trafficking Culture Project and Dr Annette Hübschle of the University of Cape Town.


First published: 3 September 2018