Dec 2, 2018Exhibiting AbsenceMuseums display objects to tell stories. What should they do when they don’t have the objects they need? — Museums display things: art, artifact, specimens. They do this, mostly, in the service of teaching facts, revealing ideas, or driving emotion or empathy. Things help museums tell stories. But sometimes, we don’t have the things we need to tell the stories we want to tell. “No ideas but in things,”…Museums15 min readMuseums15 min read
Oct 1, 2018Cabinets of CuriosityWhat they were, why they disappeared, and why they’re so popular now — Cabinets of curiosity are back in fashion. These premodern museums (also known by their German name, wunderkammer) are, it seems, also post-modern museums. They were created before the rules that shape the modern museum came into play, and they seem to offer a way around those rules today.Museums13 min readMuseums13 min read
Aug 27, 2018Advice on Writing about SkillsGeneral writing advice Don’t introduce too much. Get right to the topic. A paper is often better if you throw away the first line or the first paragraph. When you’ve finished: decide if your conclusion should really be the introduction. Don’t try to get fancy with your writing. Write as you talk. …Writing3 min readWriting3 min read
Aug 17, 2018Memorializing Disability: Lessons for MuseumsThe landscape of memory in the United States includes many memorials to those killed in our wars. It includes many fewer to those killed in the course of their work. There are many monuments honoring those who fought, and a few to those who worked. …Military17 min readMilitary17 min read
Aug 10, 2018Museums need collections and connectionsFirst, a cautionary tale: Prof. John Whipple Potter Jenks founded Brown University’s museum of natural history, ethnography and “curiosities” in 1876. Jenks was an enthusiastic collector (he acquired some 50,000 items by 1890) a fine teacher, and a diligent fund-raiser. When he died in 1893, his tombstone read: “This museum…Museums14 min readMuseums14 min read
Jun 18, 2018A toast, on the occasion of the opening of the Memory and the Museum conference[I was asked to offer a toast to open the 2018 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science forum on “Memory and the Museum.”] We are here to celebrate the beginning of a conference on museums and memory. And since we are mostly historians and anthropologists, it seems it might…Museums2 min readMuseums2 min read
May 23, 2018The Rosa Parks HouseWaterfire Arts Center in Providence, Rhode Island, is hosting Ryan Mendoza’s Rosa Parks House Project. It features Mrs. Parks’s brother’s house, from Detroit — the house she stayed in when she fled Montgomery, Alabama in August 1957, threatened and unable to find work after the bus boycott. The house, on…Civil Rights6 min readCivil Rights6 min read
Jan 9, 2018Teaching SkillIn the Fall semester, I taught a new course, a seminar for first-year students: “Skills: From the Medieval Workshop to the Maker Movement.” It was historical and hands-on: I wanted students to understand skills by reading and writing as well as by doing. …Skill9 min readSkill9 min read
Jan 5, 2018Revisualizing the Crystal PalaceCataloging History, Part 4 — “Cataloging History” is a four-part series on the history and theory of museum and exhibition catalogs, focusing on the 1853 New York Crystal Palace. Part 1 considers the early history of this genre, tracking its roots to the catalog of the Museum Wormianum and the Louvre, and exploring the variety…Data Visualization15 min readData Visualization15 min read
Aug 30, 2017Museums can deal with Confederate MemorialsMoving Confederate memorials evicted from the public square to museums solves an immediate problem. It offers mayors and governors a way out of the corner that they find themselves in. But, for museums, it raises new questions. Should museums take them? What should they do with them? Would museums be…Confederate Flag4 min readConfederate Flag4 min read
