Emma Martin

I am the Associate Director Research (Impact and Knowledge Exchange) for the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. Additionally, during the academic year 2025-26 I will be on research leave.

I am Senior Lecturer in Museology and from 2003-2020 I was Senior Curator for National Museums Liverpool (NML). This role accounted for a significant part of more than 25 years of experience as a curator of collections from South Asia, the Himalayas and Tibet. My research sits at the intersection of colonialism(s), Tibetan Studies, museum activism, and materiality and moves between contemporary museum practice in Tibetan exile contexts and historical research on Tibetan materiality in British colonial archives.  

As a practice-based researcher, I was the curatorial advisor to the museum at the Dalai Lama Centre for Tibetan and Ancient Indian Wisdom in Bodhgaya, India 2024-25. Between 2017-2023, I acted as curator/advisor to the Tibet Museum, a major museum development for the Central Tibetan Administration, otherwise known as the Tibetan government-in-exile (opened in 2022). I also led a series of interventions into the interpretation and display of the anthropology collections at the World Museum, part of National Museums Liverpool which challenged the relevance of culture-based displays in today's anthropology museum by experimenting with an issue and idea-led approach to interpretation (2017-21). While at National Museums Liverpool I also developed several contemporary collecting programmes including Tibetan Realities: Collecting Tibet and its Diasporas (2010-2020), a themed programme of collecting that brought together contemporary art (funded by the Art Fund), fieldwork collecting and commissioned works from Tibetan cultural institutions.

I am currently writing the monograph, The Dissident Museum: Oppositional Curating at the Tibet Museum (Museum in Focus Series for Routledge) based on the methods used to develop curatorial practice during the Tibet Museum project. 

My academic research focuses on reconstituting the museum roles and representations of Tibetans and Tibetan material culture past and present. I do this through the analysis of the historical record, namely colonial-era museums and archives and embedded, collaborative, practice-led research and critical reflection on contemporary museological practice. Specifically, I ask why museum-based framings of Tibet have remained largely untouched by the well-established processes of recovering and exposing the contested histories of colonial-era museum collections and how through contemporary museum practice Tibetans can address a lack of Tibetan agency in museum decision-making, both concerning the collecting of Tibetan objects, the representation of Tibet and the governance and management of museum and heritage spaces. With these questions in mind, I co-convene the international Tibetan Materiality Network, which brings together researchers from Europe and Asia for the purpose of sharing and collaborating on Tibetan and Himalayan materiality-based research.

I have published edited volumes, several journal articles, and chapters on Tibet-related material culture, including colonial collecting, colonial-era Tibetan diplomatic gift exchange, and the challenges of representing Tibet in contemporary museums. 

• Associate Editor Curator: The Museum Journal
• Editorial Board, Museum History Journal
• Contributing Editor, Journal of Museum Ethnography
• Visiting Lecturer, University of Copenhagen
• 2018-2021, Committee member for the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) conceived and managed MEG's A Repatriation Resource
• Member, International Association of Tibetan Studies (IATS)
• Member, Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies
• Member, Museums Association
• Member, Museums and Galleries History Group
• Member, British Association of South Asian Studies
• Fellow, Royal Asiatic Society
• Fellow, Higher Education Academy

I welcome PhD applications in the following areas:

• Collecting Histories in Tibetan, Himalayan, and South Asian contexts
• Histories of museums and display in Tibetan, Himalayan, and South Asian contexts
• South Asian, Himalayan and Tibetan Museology
• Studies in South Asian, Himalayan and Tibetan Materialities
• Museology and dissident community practice
• South Asian, Himalayan and Tibetan Diasporic engagement with museum collections

Completed PhD Supervision

Dr Gumring Hkangda: (2024) Conflicted Objects: Histories of Violence, Trauma and Loss entangled in Kachin material culture from northern Burma/Myanmar (1960 – Present), Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester.

Dr Henriette Pleiger: (2024) Interdisciplinary Exhibitions and the Production of Knowledge, Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester.

Dr Elizabeth Gow: (2023). Enriqueta Rylands: A Study of Private Collecting and Public Philanthropy, 1889-1908, Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester.

Dr Lewis Ryder: (2020). Museums, culture and the Hilditch collection: the contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain, Department of History, University of Manchester.

Current PhD Supervision

Lauren Barnes: Collecting in Context: Using a Global Histories approach to uncover and understand the histories and implications of collecting Korean art and culture by UK museums, from 1865 – 2020

Yasmin Foqahaa: Culture Under Siege: A Cultural Policy Framework for Cultural Sustainable Development in Palestine (SALC Funded)

Bhanu Ghalot: Dissonant Histories in South Asia's Museums: Memory, Religion, and Politics in the ‘1947 Partition Memorialisation Project’ in India (AHRC Award)

Tenzin Jinpa: Digital Sovereignty and the Dataset: Data Visualisation and Decolonial Ways of Knowing and Using National Museums Liverpool’s collection data (NWCDTP CDA)

Abhinanda Lahiri: Dress Heritage as Political Knowledge: A Gaddi Guide to Negotiating Belonging in India (1860-2024) (AHRC Award)