Claire Wintle

Dr Claire Wintle is a historian of exhibitions, museums and collections, with a particular interest in curatorial practice, exhibition design and the politics of representation. Her work explores the relationship between museums and processes of nationalism, imperialism and decolonisation, often with a focus on South Asia.

Claire is Principal 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.

Claire’s early research focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial collecting and display in and of South Asia, with a particular focus on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. She is currently working on two areas of a broader research agenda that examines the impact of exhibition and museum-making on political and economic change during the middle years of the twentieth century at a moment when independence movements dramatically affected constitutional and cultural landscapes across the world.

The first project focuses on post-independence exhibitions of India in the UK and US (1947-1986), with an emphasis on shows generated by South Asian artists, designers and curators and that probe the limits of national identity for cultural practitioners. Secondly, she is working towards a monograph on curatorial practice in the UK between 1945 and 1980, using archival research and oral histories to consider how curators with responsibility for ‘ethnographic’ or ‘world cultures’ collections grappled with the professionalisation of their field, post-war recovery and the ‘end’ of empire. She is particularly interested in the lessons that can be learnt from historic examples of international networks, repatriation and exhibition making in our current ‘decolonising’ moment.

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 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.

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.