Annie E. Coombes

Annie E. Coombes is Professor of Material and Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London where she is also Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery. Her research focuses on colonial histories and their legacy in the present in Britain, South Africa, Kenya and Australia. She also works with contemporary artists whose work addresses these legacies. Her books include Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and...See more

Annie E. Coombes is Professor of Material and Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London where she is also Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery. Her research focuses on colonial histories and their legacy in the present in Britain, South Africa, Kenya and Australia. She also works with contemporary artists whose work addresses these legacies. Her books include Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Yale, 1994) and the award-winning History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Duke, 2003). She recently edited (with Ruth B. Phillips), Museum Transformations: Decolonization and Democratisation (Wiley/Blackwells, 2015). See less