Summary
Rina is a critical and cultural theorist. She is currently working on a couple of major projects about decolonising and cultural appropriation, having just completed a co-authored book with Dinesh Bhugra, about culture within psychiatry, Journey to the Centre of the Self, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
She studied Art History at the University of Leicester. This was followed by a MA in Theology at the University of Leeds and a PhD at the University of Glasgow on the expression and experience of the sacred in ‘Death of God’ culture resulting in her 2012 monograph Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World (Lund Humphries), which was long-listed for the W. M. Berger Art History Prize. Since then, she has written extensively about the art of Francis Bacon where she maintained a stronger interest in theoretical rather than historical themes, especially the existential symbols in Bacon’s work and the aesthetics of the representation of embodiment. Her work on Bacon developed her interest in abjection and the body, the subject of her 2014 monograph, Abjection and Representation (Palgrave). Her research areas include abjection and disgust, theology and visual art, the sociology of the sacred and visual religious studies.
She is continuing her interest in the relationship between visual and material culture and religion in her current book projects on cultural appropriation in the context of Hindu symbols and a study about the insider/outsider dynamic of cultural appropriation in Reclaiming the Debate on Cultural Appropriation (forthcoming with Sage).