Devorah Romanek

Curator, Americas
The North American Collections Department: Africa, Oceania and the Americas

 

Devorah Romanek is trained in art history and anthropology, and her current research looks at the social agency of Native North American images as mediated through digitized museum collections. This research and her work builds upon her experience of working with Native North American collections, including working with the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian, where she was collection manager at the George Gustav Heye Center, where she co-curated the photographic exhibition Booming Out: Mohawk ironworker build New York.

Before taking up the position of curator of North American Collections at the British Museum she supervised a two year Getty funded project documenting and digitizing the Pictorial Collection of the British Museum’s Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and co-curated the exhibition Pacific Portraits.

Contact

dromanek@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 7323 8028

Current projects

  • Native North American Ethnographic photography

  • Digital Assets Management working party

  • Refresh of the Native North American Gallery

Previous projects

  • AOA Pictorial Collection Cataloguing Project

  • Co-curator of the British Museum photographic exhibition Pacific Portraits – July 2009 – December 2009

Membership of professional bodies

  • Member of the Museums Association, UK

  • Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute, UK

  • Member of the Museums Ethnographer Group, UK

Recent publications

D. Romanek, (forthcoming). ‘Reflections on images of objects in Melanesia’. In Artefacts of History – the Melanesian collections of the British Museum, Nicholas Thomas (ed.); BM Press.

D. Romanek, (forthcoming). ‘Diaspora Identities: Jewish Bakeries and Baked Goods in London and Berlin’. Journal of Global Studies, www.transtexts.net

D. Romanek, B. and Lynch, (2008). ‘Touch and the value of object handling: Final conclusions for a new sensory museology’. In Touch in Museums, Helen Chatterjee (ed.) London: Berg Publishers, pp. 275-86.

R. Peters, and D. Romanek, (2008). ‘Approaches to access: factors and variables’, in The International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Artworks, 2008 conference proceedings, London.

 
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