Sample Syllabus – For Registration Purposes

Exhibiting Ourselves: Museums, Display, and Identity in London

Course Instructor Dr Ann Matchette

Office Hours: Before and after class, or by appointment.

Course Description: This course explores the cultural relationship between museums and identity in London. Long recognized as important sites for reinforcing social, political, and national identities, museums have undergone significant changes since the first public museum opened over two hundred years ago. We will draw on the rich resources of London such as the British Museum, National Gallery, Imperial War Museum, Tate Britain, and the Museum of London to consider the role of these institutions both in the past and the present. Far more than storehouses preserving Britain's cultural heritage, museums can now also be agents of social change, providing a place where identities can be explored, challenged, and reconsidered. How are museums meeting the challenges of a more dynamic global city? This course takes a multidisciplinary approach, engaging with current debates within art, politics, and social sciences.

Learning Outcomes: By the end of the course, students will be able to

Analzye exhibits and develop a critical awareness of issues surrounding identity, collecting practices, modes of display, and the construction of knowledge.

Identify key debates about representation in museums and explain how the role of the museum has changed over time.

Discuss these issues in depth, demonstrating knowledge of both historical and contemporary concerns in written and oral presentations.

Method of Study: This course is taught in a variety of contexts. Meetings alternate between campus and museum sites. Themes will be introduced with an interactive lecture and seminar on campus, which is followed the next session with a class visit to a museum. That means that much of your learning will take place outside of the classroom, on site in London museums.

Assessment Participation in class discussion: 15% Presentation: 15% Short Paper 1: 20% Short Paper 2: 20% Final Exam: 30%

A Note on Academic Dishonesty: Regardless of the quality of work, plagiarism is punishable with a failing grade in the class and possible dismissal from the program. Plagiarism may be broadly defined as copying of materials from sources, without the acknowledgment of having done so, claiming other’s ideas as one’s own without proper reference to them, and buying materials such as essays/exams. If you have questions about what constitutes plagiarism, please ask your instructor. Course Schedule

Class 1 Museums and Identity – A Primer

Collecting Others, Exhibiting Ourselves

We can usefully begin by considering concepts of collecting, the practice by which most museums come into being and by which individual collectors expressed their identities. We’ll look at early collecting activities in England, issues of appropriation, and representational authority. What were museums for then, and now?

Reading:

Edward Alexander, ‘Chapter 1: What is a Museum?’, in Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, Alta Mira Press, 1996, 3-16

Steven Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 42-56

Sharon Macdonald, ‘Collecting Practices’, in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, London: Blackwell, 2011, pp. 81-97

Class 2 Site Visit: British Museum Meet at front entrance steps to the British Museum on Great Russell Street www.britishmuseum.org

Reading:

Neil G. W. Curtis, ‘Universal Museums, Museum Objects and Repatriation: The Tangled Stories of Things’, in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina M. Carbonell, Oxford: Blackwell, 2012, 73-81

Ruth B. Phillips, ‘Where is “Africa”?: Re-Viewing Art and Artifact in the Age of Globalization’, repr. in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, 758-73

Mark O'Neill, 'Enlightenment Museums. Universal or Merely Global?', Museum and Society, 2 (2004), 190-202

Class 3 Displaying the Nation

This week, our attention will shift to the development of national museums and their social-political motivations. Art museums, in particular, were seen as educational, but also as having the capacity to create good citizens. At the same time these museums played a role in shaping ideas about the nation. What was, and continues to be, the role of art in this endeavor?

Reading:

Carol Duncan, ‘The Art Museum as Ritual’, in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public

Art Museums, London: Routledge, 1995, 7-20.

Helen Rees Leahy, ‘New Labour, Old Masters’, Cultural Studies, 21, no. 4/5 (2007), 695-717

Deborah Cherry, ‘Statues in the Square: Hauntings at the Heart of Empire’, Art History, 29, no. 4 (2006), 661-97 Feedback session on independent site visit: Trafalgar Square

Class 4 Site Visit: National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery

Reading:

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Picturing the Ancestors and Imag(in)ing the Nation: The Collections of the First Decade of the National Portrait Gallery’, in her Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 23-48

Jordanna Bailkin, ‘Picturing Feminism, Selling Liberalism: The Case of the Disappearing Holbein’ (1999), in Museums Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, 2nd edn, ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell, London: Blackwell, 2012, 442-52

Class 5 Site Visit: Tate Britain

We will continue our investigation of the role art plays in expressing identity in the cultural capital. What makes ‘British Art’ British and in what ways has it changed in multicultural London?

Reading:

Andy Morris, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Questioning the Geographies of Britishness at Tate-Britain, Museums and Society, 1, no. 3 (2003), 170-82

Penelope Curtis, ‘It Doesn’t Have to be Old to be Historic or New to be Contemporary’, Tate Etc. (2013)

Julian Stallybrass, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, London: Verso, 2006, 237-69

Nick Prior, ‘Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformation of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era’, Art and Its Publics, Blackwell, 2003, 51-68

Class 6 Museums and Difference In this session we will explore the museum as an agent of social change. In the later twentieth century, museums began taking on a more proactive social role. How can museums mediate in social and cultural difference, combat prejudice, and help strengthen communities?

Reading: Sharon Macdonald, ‘Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities’, Museum and Society, 1, no 1 (2003), 1-16.

Josie Appleton, ‘Museums for “The People”?’, in Museums and their

Communities, ed. Sheila Watson, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 114-26

Nelson Graburn, ‘A Quest for Identity’, in Museums and their Communities, pp. 127-32

Richard Sandell, ‘Museums and the Combatting of Social Inequality: Roles, Responsibilities, Resistance’’, in Museums and their Communities, pp. 95- 113

K. Woodward, ‘Concepts of Identity and Difference’, in Identity and Difference, ed. K. Woodward, London: Open University Press, Sage, 2002, pp. 7-50

Class 7 Site Visit: Museum of London

Reading:

David Fleming, ‘Making City Histories’, in Making Histories in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh, London: Leicester University Press, 1999, 131-42

Nick Merriman, ‘The Peopling of London Project’, in Museums and their Communities, ed. Sheila Watson, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 335-57

Class 8 The Body Scientific: Ethics and Museums What should be shown in a museum? Human remains, historically displayed in the name of science, are now being returned to their place of origin for reburial or retained and preserved under more rigorous ethical policies. We will consider how objectifying the human body effaces individual identities and the ways in which audiences experience this encounter.

Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, et al, ‘Should We Display the Dead?’, Museums and Society, 7, no. 3 (2009), 133-49

M.M. Brooks and C. Rumsey, ‘Who Knows the Fate of His Bones? Rethinking the Body on Display: Object, Art or Human Remains’, in Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, ed. S.J. Knell, et al, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007, pp. 343-54

Yannis Hamilakis, et al. eds, Thinking through the Body, Springer Science and Business Media, 2002

Stepehn Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 Feedback session on independent site visit: Hunterian Museum

Class 9 Site visit: Wellcome Collection

Frances Larson, An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009

Class 10 Whose Past? History, Memory, and Identity

This week we will consider the blurring of history and memory. Museums that deal with conflict are a phenomenon of the modern age, and, increasingly, memory plays an important part in the histories they convey. What roles do personal experience and empathy play in narrating history? How does nostalgia affect what these institutions are trying to do? These questions encourage us to think about the nature of evidence used and the limits of objectivity.

Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, London: Routledge, 2013

Susan A. Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum’, History and Theory, 36, no. 4 (December 1997), pp. 44-63

Independent site visit: Hyde Park Memorials

Class 11 Site Visit: Imperial War Museum

Reading:

Sue Malvern, ‘War, Memory and Museums: Art and Artefact in the Imperial War Museum, History Workshop Journal, 49 (2000), 177-203

Susan A. Crane, ‘Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory’, The American Historical Review, 102, no. 5 (Dec., 1997), pp. 1372-1385

Class 12 Conclusion – Museum Futures

In our final class we will consider the future of museums, especially in light of new technologies. The concept of a ‘museum without walls’ is now more possible than ever. With the advent of the internet, social media, and digital mobile devices, the museum itself now extends beyond its walls and enters into our everyday lives. These developments afford greater personal experience on the part of viewers through interactive media but also the means to capture and relate those experiences. What are the benefits and drawbacks of this new technology?

Reading S. J. Knell, B. Axelsson, L. Eilertsen, E. Myrivili, I. Porciani, A. Sawyer, and S. Watson, S. Crossing Borders: Connecting European Identities in Museums and Online, Linkoping University Press, Linkoping, 2012

Final Exam