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“I knew I wanted to be an artist when I was young but the opportunities to do this were limited and I took the pragmatic route. By marrying an artist (Rex Dixon) I have united two loves, that of writing and painting. In an earlier time, when women were restricted from such professions, I would have had to join the nunnery to be a scholar and The UWI provided this for me in my lifetime – a space for learning and engagement with ideas…I would like to have invested a new generation of scholars with the excitement and pleasure of research, writing and increasingly, film-making to generate in them the confidence to discover new ways of seeing and learning.”

Professor Patricia Mohammed

PROFESSOR OF GENDER AND CULTURAL STUDIES AND
CAMPUS COORDINATOR, SCHOOL for GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH
CENTER FOR GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
ST. AUGUSTINE CAMPUS, TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
Tel: (868) 662-2002 exts. 2003/4186 • Email: Patricia.Mohammed@sta.uwi.edu

PROFILE

An early award that changed the course of Professor Patricia Mohammed’s career was that of a Commonwealth Secretariat Fellowship in 1984 to work at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex with Professor Kate Young as Co-Director of an international women and development study course. In 1989 Professor Mohammed was funded by the Netherlands Government through the Women and Development Studies Project of the UWI on a scholarship that facilitated her PhD at the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands and allowed the time to develop theoretical strengths and incorporate the discipline of history into her research portfolio. In 2001 the Third World Association of Students at Brown University, Rhode Island recognised Professor Mohammed as Caribbean Advocate of that year signalling that her work reached out to the youthful diasporic Caribbean population. The recognition of her peers at The University of the West Indies with the title of full Professor in 2005 marks a major achievement in the life of a scholar. A Visiting Professorship at State University of New York at Albany (2007) was valuable for teaching and seeing the Caribbean again from a US-based perspective and thus lent new research insights into the study of Caribbean iconography in art, photography and increasingly film. The breakthrough that Professor Mohammed considers most valuable to date is the incorporation of a visual lens onto an existing textually based one in examining the subject of culture and identity.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

The title of her Professorship is Gender and Cultural Studies. The combination of the two parts of this title contains the interests that have preoccupied Professor Mohammed as a scholar over the last three decades: that of understanding what shapes our class, ethnic and gender identities and produces the culturally specific ways in which we produce and live. Her research interests appear varied but they are interconnected and cumulative, thus gender and feminist theory have been amplified with the new lens of visuality. She is interested at present in the reading of the image whether still or moving, and in understanding what the Caribbean has created as an aesthetic as a result of its pecular new world history.