Museums as spaces of memory, identity and activism

General characterization

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY (selection):

ALPERS, Svetlana (1991). “The Museum as a way of seeing”. Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. London, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp.25-32.

BARRINGER, Tim; FLYNN, Tom (1998). Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum. London and New York: Routledge.

BENNETT, Tony (1995). The birth of the museum. London, New York, Routledge.

BENNETT, Tony (2004). Pasts Beyond Memory. Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

BOAST, Robin (2011). “Neocolonial collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited”. Museum Anthropology, Vol. 34, Iss. 1, pp.56-70.

CHAMBERS, Iain; DE ANGELIS, Alessandra; IANNICIELLO, Celeste, ORABONA, Mariangela; QUADRARO, Michaela (2014). The Postcolonial Museum. The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

CLIFFORD, James (1997). “Museums as Contact Zones.” Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.188-219.

DEWDNEY, Andrew; DIBOSA David; WALSH, Victoria (2012). “Museums of the Future”. Post Critical Museology. Theory and Practice in the Art Museum. London and New York: Routledge, pp.205-220.

DUDLEY, Sandra (2012). Museum Objects. Experiencing the Properties of Things. London and New York: Routledge.

DUDLEY Sandra; BARNES, Amy Jane; BINNIE, Jennifer; PETROV, Julia; WALKLATE, Jennifer (Eds,) (2011). The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation. London and New York: Routledge.

DUNCAN, Carol (1995). Civilizing Rituals: inside public art museums. London and New York: Routledge.

ERSKINE Andrew (1995). “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria”. Greece & Rome, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Apr. 1995), pp.38-48

EVANS, Jessica; BOSWELL, David (Eds.) (1999). Representing the Nation: A Reader: Histories, Heritage, and Museums. London; New York: Routledge.

GIEBELHAUSEN, Michaela (2006). "Museum Architecture: A Brief History". Sharon MacDonald (Ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford; Malden; Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, pp.223-244.

HOFFMANN, Detlef (1994). “The German Art Museum and the History of the Nation”. Daniel J. Sherman; Irit Rogoff (Eds.), Museum Culture. Histories. Discourses. Spectacles. London: Routledge, 1994, pp.3-21.

HOOPER-GREENHILL, Eilean, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

HOOPER-GREENHILL, Eilean, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

HOOPER-GREENHILL, Eilean (1992). “What is a Museum?” Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge, pp.1-22.

JANES, Robert R. (2009). “It’s a jungle in here: Museums and their self-inflicted challenges.” Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse. London and New York: Routledge, pp.57-93.

JANES, Robert R.; SANDELL, Richard (Ed.) (2019). Museum Activism. London and New York, Routledge.

KREPS, Christina (2003). “Curatorship as Social Practice”, Curator: The Museum Journal 46(3), pp.311-323.

LANG, Merike (2007). “Cultural memory in the museum and its dialogue with collective and individual memory”. Nordisk Museologi, 2, S, pp.62-75.

LOWENTHAL, David (2015). The past is a foreign country – revisited. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

LUMLEY, Robert (Ed.) (1988). The Museum Time Machine. Putting Cultures on Display. London and New York: Routledge.

MACDONALD, Sharon (Ed.) (2006). A Companion to Museum Studies. Blackwell Publishing.

MAcDONALD, Sharon (2003). “Museums, Nationalism, Postnational and Transcultural Identities”, Museums and Society 1 (1), pp.1-16.

MACLEOD, Suzanne; HANKS, Laura Hourston; HALE, Jonathan (Eds.) (2012). Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. London and New York: Routledge.

PEARCE, Susan (1994). Interpreting objects and collections. London: Routledge.

PEARCE, Susan (1990). Objects of knowledge. London: The Athlone Press.

POULOT, Dominique (2013). “Another History of Museums: from the Discourse to the Museum-Piece”. Anais do Museu Paulista, São Paulo, N. Sér. v.21. n.1, pp.27-47.

PREZIOSI, Donald; FARAGO, Claire (Eds.) (2004). Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub.

SHERMAN, Daniel J.; ROGOFF, Irit (Eds.) (1994). Museum Culture. Histories. Discourses. Spectacles. London: Routledge.

SLEEPER-SMITH, Susan (Ed.) (2009). Contesting knowledge: museums and indigenous perspectives.  Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

SOARES, Bruno Brulon; LESHCHENKO, Anna (2018). “Museology in Colonial Contexts: A Сall for Decolonisation of Museum Theory”. ICOFOM Study Series 46 | 2018, The politics and poetics of Museology, pp.61-79.

VERGO, Peter (1989). “The Reticent Object”. New Museology. London: Reaktion Books, pp.41-59.

WINTER, Tim (2012). “Heritage and Nationalism: An Unbreachable Couple?” ICS Occasional Paper Series, Volume 3, Number 4, Penrith NSW: Institute for Culture and Society University of Western Sydney, pp.1-13.

WITCOMB, Andrea (2003). Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London and New York: Routledge.

WOOD, Elizabeth; LATHAM, Kiersten F. (2014). The Objects of Experience. Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

ZERUBAVEL, Eviatar (2003). Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.

 

 

Teaching method

The course’s learning activities will comprise problem-oriented classroom discussions. They will also include visits to museums and exhibition spaces, providing students with direct contact with cultural professionals and museum experts.

Evaluation method

ASSESSMENT:

1.) Class Participation and Discussion: because this course is organized as a seminar and meets only once a week, it is particularly important that students be in attendance and prepared to participate. Therefore, part of the final grade grows from students' active participation in both museum and classroom sessions, including active engagement in the proposed discussion topics, museum-related readings, and case studies. (30%)

2.) Final Monograph Essay Assignment: students will hand in a 4,500-5,000 word-final essay focused on one of the main topics of the course contents. (70%)

Subject matter

The course focuses on the role of museums as knowledge-based institutions that create time-framed narratives and that are associated with the construction of national identities and collective memories. It will examine the historical discourses of the museum in terms of both their narratives and forms of curatorship and display. The analysis will also include the use of resources such as museum writing and storytelling technologies (e.g. films) as mechanisms for creating engaging and meaningful interpretive settings. The course will further explore the way people relate to heritage, particularly movable heritage, and how objects are displayed as historical documents, functioning both as material and as semiotic texts. Through the reading, discussion and analysis of texts and case studies, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the historical background of the museum, its main challenges in the present and how it is positioning into the future, the theoretical framework of the field of Museum Studies and the historical agencies of the institution.

The course is structured in 5 topics:

1. Museum in Theory: Past, Present and Future
2. Museums, Knowledge and Memory
3. Objects as knowledge, identity and memory
4. On Collecting: practices and thinking
5. Museums, Post-Colonialism and Activism

Programs

Programs where the course is taught: