Dr Virginie Rey

Non-Western museologies; community museums; unofficial forms of heritage; practices; diasporic heritage; Middle East and North Africa; Islamic art

The University of California, Irvine-Department of Anthropology (2018-2019)

UCLA- Department of Anthropology (2019-2020)

Samuel Jordan Center of Persian Studies, UCI (ongoing)

Australian Postgraduate Award (2010-2014)

DECRA fellowship (2023-2026)

Muslim Museums: Exhibiting Islam in Multicultural Societies

Muslim Museums examines how contemporary Muslim communities living in Western Europe, Australia and North America are using the museum as a medium to think about and curate their identity in non-Muslim-majority societies. I will do so through an ethnographic study of both already-established Muslim-led museums and forthcoming curatorial projects, in the USA, Canada, England, Germany, Switzerland and Australia. This serves the project’s theoretical aim of gaining insight into the articulation of a global Islamic identity, that exists and grows outside the geographical boundaries traditionally associated with it, whilst being simultaneously informed by global forces and circumstances. 

Sarina Wakefield, Virginie Rey. Creative Processes, Patrimonial Practices: Art and Heritage in the Middle East and North Africa. 

Creative Processes, Patrimonial Practices seeks to map out, analyse and articulate the meanings of connections between art—as a medium (e.g. painting, music, literature, and dance), a form of expression and a discipline—and heritage within public and private cultural institutions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Contributors seek to examine how artists, architects, curators and digital content producers engage with various elements of aesthetic practice to produce, re-produce an challenge cultural representations and narratives.