Dr Pandora Syperek

Ornament and Grime: Excessive Animal Products in the Bethnal Green Museum

I am Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Loughborough University London and Visiting Fellow at the V&A Research Institute. My research focuses on the intersections of art, science, gender and the nonhuman within cultures of display. I am co-founder of the research project Curating the Sea, which has resulted in the exhibition Sea Inside (Sainsbury Centre, 2025), the Paul Mellon Centre-funded collaborative project ‘Exhibiting Oceans in the UK Today’, Oceans: Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2023) and a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies (2020). I was postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre from 2016-17. I have taught on modern and contemporary art, design and curatorial studies at Loughborough University, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, UCL and York University, and previously worked on the curatorial team at the Banff Centre, Canada. I hold a PhD in the History of Art from University College London, funded by SSHRC.

Selected publications

‘Ornament and Evolution in the Bethnal Green Museum’s Collection of Animal Products, 1872-1928’, Ornament: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of ICDAD, Lisbon 10-12 October 2023 (forthcoming, 2024).

‘Oceanic Curating’ (with Sarah Wade). Environmental Humanities, ‘In Practice’ section (forthcoming, November 2024).

‘Helen Cowie, Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain’. Book review. Archives of Natural History 50:2 (2023), 436-37.

‘Hope in the Archive: Indexing the Natural History Museum’s Ecologies of Display’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 9.2 (2020), 206-29.

‘Curating Ocean Ecology at the Natural History Museum: Miranda Lowe and Richard Sabin in conversation with Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade’, Science Museum Group Journal 13 (2020).

Photo: Ezra Judd