Bryony Whitmarsh

As the Associate Dean of Global Engagement, working across the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, I am responsible for leading, developing and implementing our global engagement strategies. This includes identifying new opportunities for strategic developments including international recruitment and exchange, international student experience, transnational education arrangements, and global research and innovation initiatives. I am passionate about the importance of global engagement as a dimension of the University’s identity and welcome enquiries from potential partners, across the world.

I joined the University following a career in museums, bringing with me a wide range of experience including curation, learning in museums and a background in ancient history. I taught in the University’s School of Architecture from 2008 to 2017 where my teaching focused on the historiography of architecture and interior design (with a particular emphasis on a global history of architecture), material culture and museology.

I have recently completed my PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). My  work offers an account, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Narayanhiti Palace Museum that uncovers a broad social and political arena in which the past is made and unmade by numerous social agents including politicians, civil servants, museum professionals, and ex-palace employees, all of whom had something different to say. Spatializing memory-work through the frame of the Narayanhiti Palace has enabled me to do two things. Firstly, to identify the palace as a place where past, present and future imaginings of the nation collide through the actions of people. Second to reveal the instability of the meaning of the palace at any given moment.

I am preparing my application for Principal Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.