Tag Archives: museums

CfP: Museums as Agents of Memory and Change

Posted on by

25-26/04/2019, Estonian National Museum, Tartu, Estonia
Organisers: Estonian National Museum, University of Tartu
Keynote speakers confirmed: Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine (Birkbeck, University of London)

Museums have been shifting toward expanding their work from collecting and preserving to supporting and educating communities. They are using their collections to promote social change in the context of rising global demands on history and culture institutions. More than ever, dealing with the past is full of impediments and challenges for museums. How should they address a ‘global visitor’ who has little or no knowledge of the past – local, national or regional – to which the museum is dedicated? What stories should they tell and how, what memory cultures should they take into account? On the other hand, what have museums done and what do they intend to do in order to change the established way of remembering the past? What are the characteristics, risks and benefits in dealing with the difficult past in museums? What problems can museums tackle as they attempt to bring in changes to remembering and commemorating the past?

This conference aims to problematise museums as places of memory negotiations, and agents of societal change. While increasingly seeking to engage themselves in public life, museums are embedded in the fields of politics of memory and heritage, diverse, often disparate group interests, and power relations. How can a contemporary museum critically deal with the past and shape open debate and yet take into account diverse stakeholders and the versatility of narratives in play?

We welcome papers that approach the problems and dilemmas as well as best practices of contemporary museums as agents of memory and change:

How do museums position themselves in concurrent policies of memory and heritage? What are the roles of the museums in countries with targeted history politics? What dilemmas, possibilities and/or obstacles do they encounter in ‘memory-laden’ societies?
How do museums connect to transnational memory processes? What kind of new forms of remembrance should museums develop to make visible and/or seek to overcome tensions between group-specific, regional national and transnational memory?
How can museum relate historically specific and more abstract and structural experiences? Does anthropological universalisation have a place in national, regional or group-specific museums? How do museums address difference and shared legacy issues?
How is a transformation of the role of museums manifested in methods of visitor involvement? How are trends in recent museology linked to museums’ awareness of their role as public history agents? Are there specific trends in using media, material collections and oral histories to evoke open debate and awareness on memory matters? What topics and methods ‘work’ for different audiences, and why?
How should the issue of authorship and the autonomy of the curator in curating difficult histories (initiators, passive players, opposers) be addressed? Are curators independent agents in memory processes or do they mediate institutional points of view? Are there different practices in different types of museum (for example in art museums, cultural historical museums)?

We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines and from museum professionals as well as academics.

Please submit your abstract of 300 words for a 20‐minute paper, along with a short CV, by October 15, 2018 to: conference@erm.ee

The conference language is English.

The conference fee of 100 EUR covers attendance to all sessions, lunches and coffee/tea breaks during the conference, welcome reception, and conference materials.

The time and venue of the conference is April 25-26, 2019 at the Estonian National Museum, Tartu, Estonia.

Notification of acceptance: November 15, 2018

Deadline for registration and conference fee payment: March 30, 2019

We are expecting to publish an edited collection based on a selection of the papers presented at the conference.

Museums, Collections & Conflict, 1500-2010 – MGHG Biennial Conference 2018 Provisional Programme

Posted on by

13-14 July 2018, National Maritime Museum

Tickets can be purchased online here. For discounted conference tickets and access to the Museums History Journal, membership of the Museums and Galleries History Group can be purchased online here at a rate of £15 for students, £20 for individuals and £35 for institutions. MGHG Membership runs from 1 February to 1 February each year.

MGHG members: £40 / non-members: £70 / MGHG student members: £25 / student non-members: £40

Friday 13 July 2018

9.30 – 10.00 – Registration and tea/coffee

10.00 – 10.10 – Introduction (Kate Hill, Chair of MGHG)

10.10 – 12.10 – Panel 1: New insights into the history of the Imperial War Museum

Chair: James Wallis (University of Essex) Discussant: James Taylor (IWM London)

James Wallis (University of Essex) – The Imperial War Museum’s First World War galleries – a space of conflict?
Anna Maguire (King’s College London) – Researching Colonial Experience in the Collections of the Imperial War Museums
Kasia Tomasiewicz (University of Brighton & IWM) – Methods in the Museum: Reflections on Positionality within the Imperial War Museum

12.10 – 13.10 – Lunch (not provided) – postgraduate students lunch session for pre-registered participants only

13.10 – 14.40 – Panel 2: Museums in Wartime I: Protecting museums and objects

Anna Tulliach (University of Leicester) – Assessing the war issue at the Civic Museum of Bologna (1915-1945)
Zoé Vannier (École du Louvre) – Managing a collection “far from drums’ sound”: The evacuation and management of the Near Eastern Antiquities department of the Louvre Museum during World War II
Eva March (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) – The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Catalan art museums

14.40 – 15.10 – Tea/Coffee

15.10 – 16.40 – Panel 3: Politics of curating and displaying war

Quintin Colville (Royal Museums Greenwich) – Medals and masculinities: representing the First World War at sea through word and object
Bridget Yates (independent researcher) – ‘The present is pretty terrible, the future is unknown, the past is the only stable thing to which we can turn’: Philip Ashcroft, Rufford Village Museum and the preservation of rural life and tradition during the Second World War
Zoe Mercer-Golden (Royal Museums Greenwich) – Treasure, Triumph and Trespass: Curatorial Challenges in the Collecting and Display of “Priam’s Treasure”

17.40 – 17.00 – Break

17.00 – 18.00 – Keynote lecture: Prof Geoff Quilley (University of Sussex)

18.00 – 19.30 – Reception

Saturday 14 July

9.30 – 11.00 – Panel 4: Collecting during conflict

Simon Quinn (University of York) – British military antiquarianism and collecting during the campaign in Egypt, 1801
Nicholas Badcott (SOAS) – Collecting on campaign in Mahdist Sudan
Amanda Mason (IWM) – Collecting Contemporary Conflict at IWM

11.00 – 11.30 – Tea/coffee

11.30 – 13.00 – Panel 5: Museums in wartime II: Keeping museums going

Catherine Pearson (Anglia Ruskin University) – ‘I knew what I wanted to do and just went ahead’: The experiences of museum staff during the Second World War
Karin Müller-Kelwing (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden: Dresden State Art Collections) – Museum without objects?
Evelien Scheltinga (research-curator) – Dutch museums during World War 2

13.00 – 14.00 – Lunch (not provided) – selection of archival materials on view in Caird Library on history of the National Maritime Museum

14.00 – 14.30 – MGHG AGM

14.30 – 16.00 – Panel 6: History of War Museums

Jacqui Grainger (Royal United Services institute for Defence and Security Studies) – A Lost Museum: the RUSI Museum, 1831-1962
Phil Deans (Newcaslte University) – From A Museum on the World’s Last War, To a Museum on the Two World Wars: Crisis Management and reinvention at the Imperial War Musuem, 1939 – 1946
Melanie Vandenbrouk (Royal Museums Greenwich) – Two world wars and art at the National Maritime Museum

Conference closes

CfP: MGHG Conference: Museums, Collections & Conflict, 1500-2010

Posted on by

MGHG Biennial Conference 2018, National Maritime Museum, 13-14 July 2018

Keynote speaker: Annie Coombes, Professor of Material and Visual Culture, Birkbeck, University of London

Museums have been profoundly shaped by war and armed conflict, and have also played a significant part in shaping understandings and memories about them. Yet there has been little sustained examination of the way museums in war and war in museums has played out. Since Gaynor Kavanagh’s foundational study Museums and the First World War in 1994, and with the publication this year of Catherine Pearson’s similarly ground-breaking Museums in the Second World War, it is clear that museums have played and can play an important role in helping society address such crisis situations. On the home front, for example, museums have helped society prepare for war and armed conflict. In leading commemoration in the aftermath of war and armed conflict, museums have helped society come to terms with what happened, understand why it happened, and remember sacrifices. Yet museums have equally served as arenas where issues such as commemoration have been contested and negotiated, and where particular narratives legitimising war and conflict have been developed. This conference hopes to address a broad range of questions, including on collecting (in) war and armed conflict, on the deliberate targeting and destruction or safeguarding of museums and cultural property, and the broader range of institutions brought forth or which are strongly influenced by war and armed conflict.

We seek papers which particularly address but are not restricted to the following questions over a period from the Early Modern to the end of the twentieth century:

What have museums done during periods of conflict and what has happened to them? Have they been responsible for morale, have they been targets of attack, have they physically moved and how has their staffing been affected?
How have museums and collections acted to commemorate conflict?
In what ways have wars and other conflicts affected museums’ and collectors’ collecting activities, positively or negatively? How have wars and conflicts been collected, and by whom?
How have museums represented war, civil war and other conflicts such as rebellions? Have museums promoted peace by interpreting war?
How have museums of conflict, of the armed forces and of weaponry/armouries developed historically?

We welcome proposals for papers which deal with the history of museums and collecting in a British, European or wider context or which address the relationships between different geographical areas.

Paper proposals should be for papers of 20 minutes’ length. Proposals should be 250 words max and include the name, contact details and affiliation (if applicable) of the speaker.
Panel proposals are strongly encouraged and should consist of a panel title, proposals for 3 papers, along with a rationale for the panel theme, and contact details and affiliations (if applicable) of all participants. Please indicate whether you will provide a chair for your session or not (it does not matter which).
Poster proposals are also welcomed. Please contact Kate Hill (khill@lincoln.ac.uk) for more information.

All the above proposals should be sent to contact@mghg.info by 1 March 2018. Please note all speakers and poster presenters will be expected to pay the conference registration fee.

Further information here.

CfP: Communication and the Great War 1914-2014

Posted on by

Contributors are sought for a proposed edited volume which focuses on communication in and after the Great War. Despite the imposition of censorship, it was still necessary to communicate with populations in war. Communication is broadly defined here, ranging from the national and regional to the local and may focus on the reasons for going to war; war aims and objectives; national and local government policy in relation to areas such as conscription, rationing or labour co-ordination, through to informal communication between loved ones. Even after the war ended the implications of the peace settlement need to be explained to the masses. Had the war been worth the sacrifice? There is also scope in this call for work being undertaken which examines how the war has been presented to the public in musuems and other public forums since the conflict ended.

Areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:

The role of the press (national and regional)
Intellectual explanations of the war
Local and national government communication
Communication within the armed services
Transnational communication
Informal Communication (letter Writing for example)
Museums/Public forums and the presentation of the War

If scholars are interested in contributing to this volume please email an abstract of around 200 words to the proposed editor for the project Dr John Griffiths, Senior Lecturer in History, Massey University, New Zealand. j.griffiths@massey.ac.nz by January 5 2018.

CfP: ESSHC 2018 Session: Digitising visitor encounters with warfare

Posted on by

European Social Science History Conference 2018 (Queen’s University, Belfast, April 4-7, 2018)
Session title: Digitising visitor encounters with warfare
Session Organisers: Dr Ria Dunkley, University of Glasgow and Laurie Slegtenhorst MA, Erasmus University Rotterdam

War has been a popular tourist attraction for centuries (Seaton, 1996), while throughout the 20th-century, warfare and allied memorabilia arguably constituted the world’s largest tourist attraction (Smith, 1996). This situation shows little sign of abating within the present day, when visitation of sites such as the Battlefields of Culloden (UK) and those associated with World War I and II continues to increases (Dunkley, 2011). Yet, for many visitors, understanding the events that have occurred at historical places can be difficult. This is particularly the case for ancient battle sites, where historical relics associated with the event are no longer visible. Due to the increase centrality of visual representations in present day society, publics often desire affective connection to the past, involving tacit involvement with a history that can be touched, heard and smelt, as well as seen (Landsberg, 2015). Digital tools, such as apps, virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D animation arguably provide visitors with totalising, immersive experiences of history and enable an appreciation of the multiple layers of history at war-related sites. Yet, despite a recent proliferation in the number of sites harnessing digital technology to augment the visitor experience, little research has focused upon the way such sites are experienced by the visitors who use these digital tools.

This session seeks papers that explore how different types of visitors engage with history at war-related sites in diverse ways. Questions that will be central to the session include: how do visitors use digital tools to navigate sites of war?; how is the experience history enhanced through digital mediation?; do digital tools engage visitors with history at a deeper, more critical level?; can digital technology enhance understandings of complex historical events? and; is it possible to cater to the needs of homogenous groups of visitors (including, school children, special interest tourists, serendipitous visitors, veterans, survivors and victims’ relatives) through harnessing digital technology?

Proposed research topics include, but are not limited to:

Visitor experiences of using digital technology to navigate sites associate with war (including sites of actual events, as well as museums, memorials and sites of internment);
The significance of memory and pre-conceptions to how digital representations are engaged with;
The representation of divergent identities within digital applications developed for war-related sites (including representations of gender, class and race);
The potentials of digitisation of war-related sites for formal and informal learning (particularly in terms of democracy education);
Innovative methodologies for understanding how the visitor experience is mediated by digital technology at war-related sites.

Presentations should be approximately twenty minutes in length. Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Laurie Slegtenhorst (slegtenhorst@eshcc.eur.nl) and Ria Dunkley (ria.dunkley@glasgow.ac.uk) by April, 23, 2017. Submissions should also include: Author name, institutional affiliation, e-mail and mailing address. Please do also get in touch with any questions, or to discuss alternative forms of presentation.

For more information on the conference, please visit: https://esshc.socialhistory.org/