Dr Renate Dohmen

Professional biography

Visual Communication & Cultural Studies, Diplom (Berlin University of the Arts), PhD Art History (University of Newcastle)

Renate Dohmen joined the Open University in February 2015. Her previous professional experience includes serving as Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, teaching for the World Arts and Artefacts Programme (Birkbeck College & British Museum), and holding visiting lectureships at Goldsmiths College, Middlesex University, and other London institutions.

She has held a range of research appointments including Research Associate at the Ferguson Centre for Asian and African Art (Open University, Milton Keynes), Research Assistant at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (King's College London), and participant in the AHRB Research Project 'Art and National Identity: Mexico, Japan, India, 1860s-1940s' (University of the Arts, London). She has received multiple research grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2020-2021) for her project Colonial Art in British India: Power, Gender and Race under the Raj.

Research interests

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.

Teaching interests

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.

Impact and engagement

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 collaborated with Norfolk Museums on 'Decolonizing the Museum' (2020), a project designed to support museum staff in developing decolonization strategies.

External collaborations

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