Claire Wintle

Dr Claire Wintle is Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art and Design History. She is the Course Leader for the MA Curating Collections and Heritage, a collaborative masters programme developed between the University of Brighton and Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove.

Her research focuses on practices of curating, objects, collecting and museums and examines the ways in which the material world interacts with the politics of empire, nationalism and decolonisation. She has a particular interest in the interpretation of India in museums and galleries, in the UK, the US and in India itself.

Claire currently supervises five AHRC-funded PhD students, working on themes ranging from Australian textile design to diaspora engagement with museums. She works with colleagues at the British Museum to supervise Collaborative Doctoral Projects on the British Museum's relationships with anthropologists and museums in West Africa, 1945-80, and South Asian donors to the British Museum.

She welcomes enquiries from students keen to work on her areas of expertise:

• Museums and collecting
• Empire and decolonisation
• Disciplinary histories of world art and anthropology
• Victorian popular culture and imperialism
• The material culture of South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean
• Cultures of modelling and miniaturization
• Material culture and nationalism

Claire read American Studies (BA Hons) and Art Gallery and Museum Studies (MA) at Manchester University before being awarded an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship in the History of Art at the University of Sussex and the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. Her research has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the AHRC, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, the University of Cambridge’s Crowther-Beynon Fund, the Henry James Green Trust and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has published in journals including The American Historical Review, History Workshop Journal and the Journal of the History of Collections. Her monograph, Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (2013), is published by Berghahn. She was a Caird Research Fellow at London's National Maritime Museum in 2013 and a Mid-Career Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in 2018. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Before coming to Brighton, Claire worked in collections, learning and public programmes at the Walker Art Gallery, World Museum Liverpool, Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. She curated the exhibition Temple, Man and Tuson: Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and organized their international conference Objects, Images and Imaginings: Visual and Material Culture of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. She was the Secretary of the Museum Ethnographers Group between 2010 and 2014. She continues to work as a consultant to the museum sector and contributes to professional journals such as Museums Journal and the Journal of Museum Ethnography.