Museums in Arabia

Karen Exell is Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL Qatar, and a consultant at Qatar Museums. She directed the MA in Museum and Gallery Practice at UCL Qatar from 2011-2015, after teaching museums studies and holding curatorial positions in university museums in the UK for several years. She is currently involved in two QNRF-funded research projects, as a PI on project researching museum pedagogy in Qatar and the region, and as LPI on a project exploring the concept of national identity in relation to the planned new National Museum of Qatar. Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes, Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses and Practices (Ashgate, 2014) and Museums in Arabia: Transnational Practices and Regional Processes (Ashgate, 2016). Her monograph, Modernity and the Museum in the Arabian Peninsula, will be published by Routledge in 2016.

Sarina Wakefield gained her doctorate from the Open University, UK, which she is currently preparing to turn in to a monograph. Her PhD research analyses the connections and tensions that emerge from combining autochthonous and franchised heritage in Abu Dhabi, UAE, providing a unique window in to the process of creating hybrid heritage in non-western contexts. Her study contributes to new ways of understanding heritage as a process which have been developed within the emerging field of interdisciplinary critical heritage studies. The study explores how transnational heritage contributes to the development of newly emergent cosmopolitan identities. She has lectured at UCL Qatar. She has worked on museum and heritage projects in the UK and Bahrain, and in 2012, she established and co-organised the Museums in Arabia international conference at the British Museum, London. Her publications include 'Falconry as Heritage in the United Arab Emirates' in World Archaeology (44, no. 2, 2012); 'Hybrid Heritage and Cosmopolitanism in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi' in Reimagining Museums: Practice in the Arabian Peninsula, edited by Pamela Erskine-Loftus (Edinburgh and Boston: MuseumsEtc, 2013).