Ruth Barnes
Between 1990 and 2009, Ruth Barnes was textile curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she focused on early Indian Ocean trade networks. She published Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt:The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and co-authored (with Rosemary Crill and Steven Cohen) Trade, Temple and Court: Indian Textiles from the Tapi Collection (2002).Most recently, she co-edited Five Hundred Years of Indonesian Textiles with Mary Kahlenberg. In January 2010, she left the Ashmolean and moved to Yale, where she now is senior curator of the Yale University Art Gallery’s newly endowed Department of Indo-Pacific Art. Barnes received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, based on her research in eastern Indonesia and her dissertation, The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera: A Study of an Eastern Indonesian Weaving Tradition (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1989).