UTM grad student works to uncover unsettling truths of looted artifacts

Isra Saymour would have preferred to go to an amusement park occasionally. Instead, her childhood family vacations always involved visiting museums, instilling in her a curiosity about the background of the items on display. Later, she became intrigued by art heists, both real and fictional. These interests shaped her academic path, and today the sociology PhD candidate leads the Looting Lab based at U of T Mississauga, a tri-campus hub for the innovative study of stolen and contested cultural heritage.   

“We chose the concept of loot as a unifying framework for exploring issues around the origins of museum collections, and how the journeys of these collections have been shaped by invasion, colonization and illicit trade,” says Saymour, who completed her undergraduate degree in criminology and anthropology at UTM and her master’s degree at U of T’s Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies. “Loot is derived from the Hindustani word lūt, which doesn’t just refer to items obtained through theft, but also through violence and inequality.”  

Through her doctoral research, which involves tracing the movement of historical manuscripts from three different countries from the moment they were taken by colonial powers to the moment various museums acquired them, Saymour recognized significant gaps in the scholarship on looting.  

“First, there was a dearth of literature and scholarship on what looting even was, and how it worked,” she says. “There was also a gulf between two main bodies of research. On one side, there were explorations of specific instances of colonial looting. On the other, there were studies on the big-picture processes in the modern illicit antiquities trade and the role of organized crime. I wanted to create a space where we could explore these things together because, without fail, every single country that’s devastated by the modern black market has some sort of colonial history.”

With support from several UTM departments and U of T’s Jackman Humanities Institute, the Looting Lab launched in 2024. There are participants from UTM, the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Faculty of Information Studies, Victoria College and U of T Libraries.

“UTM is the best place for the kind of work that I’m trying to do – which defies categorization –

because of its deeply interdisciplinary community,” says Saymour, noting that the hub includes members from anthropology, criminology, history, visual studies and more at U of T, along with several international researchers. “Also, the multiculturalism at UTM is unmatched, which ensures that we have many members who represent communities whose heritage has been affected by looting.”

Though there’s been a recent spike in public recognition of the role that looting has played in building museum collections, which Saymour attributes in part to the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for the restitution of stolen African art, she says there are still many obstacles to conducting research on the subject. “The main institutional barrier is getting access to data on collections.”

To address this hurdle, the Looting Lab is aiming to create a new searchable database where looting scholars can share and connect scattered resources. Lab members will also collaborate to reconstruct the provenance – the historical record of ownership – of contested heritage collections as part of a broader effort to re-evaluate current curatorial practices.  

“We’re bringing gaps in the provenance of items to the forefront instead of pushing them into the shadows,” says Saymour. “This may require people in the field to reckon with legacies of violence and ethical or legal responsibilities to try to reunite items with their source communities. It may also lead to a radical increase in the number of repatriations and new equitable arrangements of ownership, access and control.”

To start, the Looting Lab is working to change the way that scholars and museum curators engage with looted items and collections. “We’re fortunate to be doing this research in the midst of a sea change in awareness of cultural looting over the past five years,” says Saymour. “There’s an urgent need to interrogate the past and help people understand the world better through the objects they see in museums.”