PROVENANCE WORKSHOP - Looting Lab x Hidden Stories

Revisiting and Reconfiguring Provenance: New paradigms for the study of loot, illicit trade, and contested cultural heritage

July 10-11, 2026, University of Toronto Mississauga

A collaborative workshop co-hosted by the Looting Lab and the Hidden Stories Project

Unprovenanced materials—objects and records that circulate without clear histories—remain a persistent challenge for cultural heritage research and stewardship. Revisiting and Reconfiguring Provenance is a two-day workshop bringing together scholars and heritage professionals to connect three strands of critical provenance research—criminology & socio-legality, circulation & networks, and counterhistory—with a particular focus on documentary heritage (books, manuscripts, archives, papyri) and the institutional infrastructures that shape their afterlives.

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TALK & WORKSHOP - CSACH x Looting Lab

Books, Swords, and Holy Relics: the Colonial Looting of South Asia

The Looting Lab is pleased to partner with the Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities for a talk and workshop on looted South Asian heritage by Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan, curator and scholar of dispersed South Asian heritage.

Event description:

In this special two-part event, Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan, former Lead Curator for South Asian Collections at the British Library, will explore the entangled histories of colonial conquest and cultural plunder across South Asia. The talk will trace three major cases—the Delhi Collection, material looted from Tipu Sultan's court, and Tibetan artifacts seized during the Younghusband Expedition—uncovering how books, weapons, and sacred objects were taken and circulated through imperial networks, followed by a workshop on theoretical and methodological approaches to researching contested heritage using scattered archives, incomplete metadata, and digital tools.

Register now at tiny.cc/Loot (talk) and tiny.cc/TwistedTrails (workshop)

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