Professor Clare Harris

Clare’s pioneering work on Tibetan art, visual/material culture, photography and museums has effectively created a new field of study for which she has received recognition in the form of book prizes, research awards and invitations to lecture at universities around the world. Much of Clare’s work on Tibet and its diaspora has been informed by her wider interests in art and aesthetics; the politics of constructions of knowledge, collecting and representation (especially in relation to museums, the art world, and photography); and a critical approach to the impact and aftermath of British imperialism and Chinese interventions in Tibet. Her doctoral thesis was published as In the Image of Tibet (1999), the first study of modernist and contemporary Tibetan art. Later books, such as The Museum on the Roof of the World (2012) and Photography and Tibet (2016) break new ground with their interrogation of the modes in which Tibet has been represented museologically, visually and politically, both by outsiders and Tibetans themselves. This work is the product of many years of research in Tibetan communities (primarily in India where she has been conducting fieldwork since the early 1990s), as well as in museums and archives in Europe, North America and various parts of Asia. Clare continues to combine anthropological fieldwork, art historical analysis, and archival research in her ongoing project on the history and after-lives of photographs created in the Indian Himalayas since the colonial period. Much of her research feeds into curatorial activities at the Pitt Rivers Museum, in art galleries in the UK and in Asia, and in projects primarily devised in collaboration with contemporary artists from Tibet, the Himalayas, and the Tibetan diaspora. In 2022 she also worked with the doyenne of performance art, Marina Abramovic, to create an installation at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a book responding to Abramovic’s exhibition ‘Gates and Portals’ at Modern Art Oxford.

Clare is very much a public-facing academic and curator who, in addition to giving lectures and conference papers internationally, has given many talks for audiences outside academia, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and BBC Radio Oxford.

Current Research Topics

Critical analysis of the representation of Tibet in museums, art, material culture and the visual economy from the mid-19th century to the present
Curatorial collaborations with artists and academic analysis of their interventions in museums
Rethinking the concept of the ‘artworld’ ethnographically in local and global contexts
Photographic practices in the Indian Himalayas from the colonial period to the present
The ‘decolonisation’ of ethnographic museums

Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India, a 4 year AHRC-funded project. Clare Harris is Co-Investigator and will curate an exhibition about this project at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2026.

Academic/curatorial activities in and beyond Oxford

Clare has served on the advisory boards of several journals and has acted as a consultant to cultural/museum institutions in the UK and India. In 2013-2014 she was Acting Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum. She has examined more than 25 doctorates and acted as external examiner at Birkbeck College and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has been an advisor for a number of research projects conducted by others, both in the UK and in other parts of Europe and she has served as a Peer Reviewer for academic bodies such as the AHRC. Clare has convened four major international conferences and has contributed to the organisation of several others conferences, in addition to leading panels and workshops on specific topics for them. She has curated eight exhibitions and hosted several residencies for artists at the Pitt Rivers Museum. In 2018-2019 her collaboration with one of them, Nyema Droma, led to the exhibition ‘Performing Tibetan Identities’. Her projects at the Pitt Rivers Museum have often featured high levels of public and community engagement, such as ‘My Tibet Museum’ and the ‘Talking Tibetan Identities’ workshops for members of the Tibetan community in the UK.

A Very Brief Biography

Following her education in state schools in the UK and a British Forces school in Germany, Clare went on to study for her BA at the University of Cambridge and studied for her MA and doctorate at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London. Her first academic position was in the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, where she was lecturer in the Anthropology of Art from 1994 -1998. In 1998, she took up a joint appointment at the University of Oxford as a Lecturer-Curator at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Pitt Rivers Museum. In 2002, she became a Fellow of Magdalen College. In 2014, she gained the title of Professor of Visual Anthropology at Oxford.

In July 2019 Clare was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition of her outstanding research on visual/material culture of the Himalayas, Tibet and the Tibetan diaspora. From October 2024, Clare will be the Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography for three years.