Dr Renate Dohmen

Professional biography

Renate is interested in questions of the global and visual culture in contemporary and colonial contexts. Her approach is interdisciplinary and encompasses art, anthropology and cultural history with a particular focus on decoloniality, the transcultural, as well as issues of race and gender. She is also interestd in questions of pedagogy, transformative learning and global citizenship education. Her work engages with questions of criticality in relation to contemporary art, indigeneity and questions of art and empire focused on British India. She would be happy to supervise PhD theses in these areas.

Renate was Module Chair for A843 the first year of the MA in Art History and Deputy Module Chair of A844, the second year of the MA in Art History and authored a section on women's street art in India for this module. She was a member of the production team of A344 Art and its global histories, developing course content as book editor and co-author of Empire and Art: British India ( Book 3 of this module) and editor of the section Empire and Art: British India in the course reader Art and its global histories: A Reader.

Dohmen, R. (ed) (2017) Empire and Art: British India, Manchester, Manchester University Press (in association with the Open University). https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526122940/

Dohmen, R. (2017) ‘Empire and Art: British India’, in Newall, D. (ed) Art and its Global Histories: A Reader, Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 179-247. https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526119926/

She also contributed to A111 Discovering the arts and humanities and is currently developing a pilot project for gamified approches to learning in collaboration with Georgina Holden, Senior Lecturer in Design and Innovation at the Open University and Pamela Bracewell-Homer, Associate Lecturer in Art History at the Open University.

Renate has made short films and has created web-based edcuational material on objects relating to empire that are open access and aimed at a general audience.

The Pilkington album (1893-94)  (http://www.openartsarchive.org/resource/open-arts-object-pilkington-album-1893-94-university-cambridge

Tipu's Tiger http://www.openartsarchive.org/resource/open-arts-object-tipu%E2%80%99s-tiger-18th-century-victoria-and-albert-museum-london

Traveling Objects 

Click on the link below and search for 'Tipu's Tiger' and 'Staffordshire Meat Dish with Oriental Scene'

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/travellingobjects

Daughters of Empire

‘A daughter of the Empire: Edwardian life in India, 1901-03,’ a collaborative project between King’s College Archives, Birkbeck College and the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE) which traces the life of Beryl White based on her scrap album. Accessible at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/history/archives/india (June 2007) 

She was engaged in a collaboration with Norfolk Museums on the topic of ‘Decolonizing the Museum’ (2020). The pilot project, financed by OU seed funding (Strategic Research Investment Fund), is aimed at supporting museum staff to explore approaches to decolonising the museum and how this can be applied in their work. This involves engaging with the colonial histories of objects in the collection as well as how issues of race can be addressed in museum curation and through audience engagement.

She is a member of the Global Indigenous Arts Network project https://www.globalindigenousarts.net and serves on the advisory board of Third Text.