Emerita Professor Louise Tythacott

Professor Louise Tythacott retired as Professor of Curating and Museology in 2024. 

She initially arrived at SOAS in 2014 as Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Asian Art, and was later promoted to Pratapaditya Pal Professor in Curating and Museology of Asian Art. She also worked briefly as Woon Tai Jee Professor of Asian Art at Northumbria University, where, amongst other things, she was responsible for leading a team of lecturers and researchers involved with the International Research Centre for the History and Culture of Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms. 

Earlier in her career she taught Museology in the Art Gallery & Museum Studies MA programme at the University of Manchester (2003-2014), as well as modules on ‘Critical Museology and Non-Western Art’ in the School of Asian and African Studies at the University of Sussex in the 1990s. 

Before moving into academia, Louise worked for over a decade in various museums in the UK, latterly as a Curator, then Head of Department, at National Museums Liverpool (1996-2003). Here she was lead project curator for the World Cultures Gallery, with specific responsibilities for the Asia and Buddhism displays. She also worked as the Curator of a private Burmese textile collection, an Exhibitions Officer at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery & Museums, Brighton, and a Managing Editor of the key, peer-reviewed journal, Museum and Society. She continues to be actively involved in the museum sector in the UK and internationally, as a curator, consultant and museum trustee. 

In terms of teaching, at SOAS, since 2014 Louise was responsible for initiating and creating a portfolio of new museology and curating modules, many of which have been highly subscribed and, as a result, are now taught by various colleagues:

• Collecting and Collections(originated with Professor Stacey Pierson)
• Collecting and Curating Buddhist Art in the Museum
• Curating Cultures
• Loot, Collecting and Restitution 
• Museums and Museology
• Museums, Anthropology and the Arts of Asia and Africa 
• Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies MA programme (originated with Professor Paul Basu)
• Representing China in Museums 

She has also convened and taught: 

• Asia and Africa on Display
• Curating Global Arts
• Southeast Asia's Art Histories II (study tour in France and Netherlands)
• Themes in the Art and Archaeology of East Asia
• Themes in the Art and Archaeology of South and Southeast Asia
• Curating Asian Art (as part of the Diploma in Asian art)

She has contributed to other modules in the School of Arts:

• Arts, Culture and Commodification: Themes in the Global Creative and Cultural Industries
• Research Methods (for PhD students)
• Theories of Art

Louise has supervised 180 MA dissertations over the past 20 years, as well as 22 PhD theses and examined 18 PhDs at various universities around the world. In recognition of her leadership in the field of teaching and learning, she was awarded Senior Fellowship of the HEA in 2021.

At SOAS she served on the University-wide Collections and Galleries Advisory Panel and Brunei Gallery Management Strategy Group. She is a committee member of Asia Collections Network-Europe, a member of the European Association of Chinese Studies, European Association for Asian Art and Archaeology, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, British Association for Chinese Studies, Museum Ethnographers Group, amongst other professional bodies, and is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Louise’s first degree was in Social Anthropology with Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and her post-graduate research was based at the University of Hong Kong where she undertook fieldwork on Chinese folk deity imagery and temple iconography. She studied Mandarin and Cantonese at the University of Westminster and was awarded her PhD in Museology from the University of Manchester. 

Over the past 30 years, she has written or edited 8 academic books, numerous articles, book chapters and reviews, as well as publishing a range of more popular, educational monographs. One of her key publications is The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display (Berghahn, 2011, translated into Chinese by Contemporary China Publishing House, Beijing, in 2025). Partly funded by the AHRC, it drew upon over five years research - fieldwork in different parts of China, interviews in the UK and China, research in archives and a reflexive analysis of her work as Curator of Asian Collections at National Museums Liverpool. 

For the past decade or so, she has also been researching the biographies of objects looted from the Yuanmingyuan or old ‘Summer Palace’ in Beijing. She visited and documented 11 military museums in the UK, in order to write a journal article (‘Trophies of War’). In 2013, she organised a two-day international conference on the topic at the University of Manchester, which included contributions from leading specialists - art historians, historians, architects, journalists and curators - and which resulted in an edited book, Collecting and Displaying China’s ‘Summer Palace’ objects in the West: The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France. In 2017, she secured a major philanthropic donation to undertake further research on ‘Summer Palace’ objects. With the help of a research assistant, she visited 29 museums, libraries and archives in the UK, Dublin and Paris in order to analyse artefacts, historic documents, museum displays and interview curators. She was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2022 to complete a monograph based on this research.

Since 2016, Louise has also  worked with Christian Luczanits on a project to document and display Tibetan Buddhist Monastery Collections in Ladakh and northern Nepal. They were awarded a grant of £356,759 from the AHRC in 2016 (Christian was the Principal Investigator, Louise was the Co-Investigator) and, over a three-year period, travelled to, and worked in, a range of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in order to help develop museum displays. Christian and Louise organised a workshop at SOAS on the topic in 2018, along with Chiara Bellini (post-doctoral researcher), and then co-edited a book from the proceedings – Tibetan Monastery Collections and Museums: Traditional Practices and Contemporary Issues (Vajra, 2024).   

Louise also has an interest in the restitution of cultural heritage, having organised a key international conference on the subject in 2010 with her colleague Kostas Arvanitis in Manchester. This was attended by museum professionals, policy makers, politicians, consultants and academics from around the world, and resulted in a co-edited volume - Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (Routledge, 2014).  

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