Dr Claire Wintle is a historian of museums, exhibitions and collections with a particular interest in curatorial practice, exhibition design and the politics of representation. Her research explores how museums have shaped and been shaped by nationalism, imperialism and decolonisation. She mobilises historical analysis to inform more equitable futures for museums and their publics.

Claire is Principal Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art and Design History. She is Director of the University’s  Centre for Design History where she leads a community of over fifty researchers investigating the histories of objects, images and design systems including museums and exhibitions. She holds an Honorary Professorship at Shiv Nadar University (India) and is a Visiting Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University in 2025.

She was the founding Course Leader of the University of Brighton’s MA Curating Collections and Heritage, a collaborative programme developed with Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. Her teaching focuses on the ethics of contemporary museum practice with an emphasis on widening participation in and access to cultural heritage.

Research Interests

Museums and Decolonisation
Claire’s work has deepened understanding of the colonial foundations of museum practice and the complexities of decolonial change. Her books include Museums in the Wake of Empire: Global Collections in Post-war Britain (forthcoming, Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre), Cultures of Decolonisation (co-edited with Ruth Craggs) and Colonial Collecting and Display. She is particularly interested in the lessons that can be drawn from historical examples of repatriation, deaccession, collecting, storage, documentation and exhibition-making in today’s ‘decolonising’ moment. Claire is also interested in how museum professionals today can cultivate resilience when working with collections linked to traumatic histories such as slavery and colonialism.

Histories and Futures of Professional Practice in Museums
Inspired by her own background in museum work and her leadership of postgraduate training at Brighton, Claire’s research explores labour and professional identity in the museum sector. From 2022 to 2024 she co-led the AHRC-funded network Making Museum Professionals, 1850 to the present with Dr Kate Hill (University of Lincoln), resulting in a special issue of Museum Worlds and policy guidance for the Museums Association which has informed recent sector-wide discussions on equity and recruitment. The project examined the historical roots of museum professions and their structural inequalities, informing contemporary campaigns for fairness and inclusion.

Claire research has also brought Museum Studies into new dialogue with Design History to investigate the role of design and designers in museum practice. In 2020 she convened the international conference Museum Exhibition Design: Histories and Futures with students Kate Guy and Hajra Williams. The event attracted 500 participants and 50 speakers from 20 countries and remains a permanent resource with recorded papers and learning materials: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/musex/. The conference was reviewed in Design Issues and led to her book Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum (Routledge, 2024, edited with Kate Guy and Hajra Williams).

Indian Design and Craft
Claire also specialises in Indian design and craft histories. She has published widely on the representation of India in exhibition design in the US, UK and India, and the role of Indian designers in post-independence transnational development. More recently she has explored sustainability in Indian craft production. In collaboration with Prof Karina Rodriguez Echavarria (Computer Science, UoB), she investigates the relationship between craft and digital technologies. Their work has attracted two major AHRC grants supporting partnerships with the National Institute of Design (Gujarat), the Jawaja Artisans Alliance (Rajasthan) and UK museums.

Dr Wintle welcomes enquiries about projects on museums, exhibition design, collecting, cultural forms of imperialism, nationalism and decolonisation, especially in Britain, and the material and visual culture of South Asia.

Claire has supervised six PhDs to completion and currently supervises seven AHRC-funded PhD students. She has examined postgraduate theses at SOAS, Leicester University, Royal Holloway, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Southampton and a further eight PhDs at the University of Brighton. Her students focus on themes ranging from British South Asian community engagement with museums to the professional experiences of museum staff working to decolonise practice. She works with colleagues at the British Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Horniman Museum and the V&A to supervise Collaborative Doctoral Projects on subjects including the British Museum's relationships with museums in West Africa, South Asian donors to the British Museum, exhibition design at the British Museum and Korean collections at the V&A. She also works with colleagues at Shiv Nagar University in India to supervise a PhD project on Bihar Museum.

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, Journal of Design History, History Workshop Journal and the Journal of the History of Collections. Her first monograph, Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (2013), is published by Berghahn. Her new book, Museums in the Wake of Empire: Global Collections in Post-war Britain will be published by Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. 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, including as contributing editor. She collaborates extensively with colleagues in the museum sector, especially at the British Museum, where she has supervised four collaborative PhD students, contributed to many workshops, conferences and symposia, collaborated on AHRC-funded projects, and contributed to exhibitions.