Dr Tehmina Goskar

Biography

Tehmina Goskar is Senior Research Fellow and Project Lead (PI) on the three-year AHRC Catalyst project "All that glitters: Investigating hierarchies of preciousness and beauty in gem and jewellery collections" with co-leads (Co-Is) Judy Willcocks of Central St Martins Museum & Study Collection and Duncan Murdock of Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

She was formerly Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded Transforming Collections project, part of Towards a National Collection where she undertook a programme of research entitled 'Patterns of Patronage' which takes a revisionist and decolonial view of acquisitions, gift-giving and the shaping of public art collections, particularly at the interface of technological changes in the (perception of) the organisation of knowledge.

Tehmina is a lifelong curator and cultural historian. She has curated over 30 exhibitions and collections projects ranging from Viking loot to contentious dolls. Tehmina has undertaken work and research in museums across the world, from Lapland to Aotearoa New Zealand. With a hybrid background in academia and public museums, Tehmina has become a leading thinker in cultural and social history in museums, material culture, ethics, and decolonial approaches.

Her research has taken diverse routes in terms of period and range but all have been centred on addressing the fundamental systems of exchange, especially those that underpin notions of societal ownership, museums and public collections and the interplay of materials and design. She is a long-term critic of disciplinary separatation in the research of material culture and the use of museum collections and their documentation as epistemology in their own right. She developed her 50-50 curatorial philosophy and developed the Citizen Curators programme while leading the Curatorial Research Centre (2018 to 2023). She was awarded the Fellowship of the Museums Association (MA) in recognition of her advocacy and impact on the UK museum sector. She was a former member of the MA's Ethics Committee and Decolonisation Guidance Working Group. In 2025 she published an open access thinking book entitled Citizen Curators: An Introduction to Museums and Collections for Beginners.

Tehmina is also a gemmologist having been awarded the Certificate in Gemmology by Gem-A, the Gemmological Association of Great Britain (2022) and the Graduate Diamonds Diploma by GIA, the Gemological Institute of America (2026). Alongside her current research focus on materials, design, ethics and sustainability in gem materials and jewellery, she is a trainee jewellery valuer and a student member of both the Institute of Registered Valuers of the National Association of Jewellers and the Jewellery Valuers Association (JVA). In 2024 she was awarded the JVA Alan Hodgkinson prize to support her journey in professional jewellery valuation.

She writes, speaks, lectures and advocates widely for critical collections research and has directly taught and mentored over 100 people embarking on their curatorial journeys and has also started to share her research on gems and jewellery in the context of differential value systems (e.g. museum and market) and critical decolonial approaches to topics such as sustainability and ethics in the gem and jewellery industries. Alongside her research at UAL, she is also Research Curator at the Museum of Cornish Life where she has led a major collections project to transform the purpose of its social history collections from one that centres nostalgia to one that functions more as a culture house for folk art, life and culture. Tehmina is a successful and able fundraiser, having directly or substantially helped to raise over £1.25 Million for research, professional development and museum and heritage projects.

Tehmina plays traditional folk music on the fiddle and is an amateur astrologer.