HIST46030: An Exhibitionary Complex: Museums, Collecting, and the Historical Imagination

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• To help students develop an understanding of how and why museums grew as institutions over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, and how they intersect with modes of collecting, categorizing, and experiencing objects in the modern era
• To help students develop a deep engagement with the ways in which museums have contributed to a sense of historical time and the creation of cultural difference, and to what extent that maps onto the history of institutions in Durham and the Northeast

• With a lineage traced to ancient Alexandria and the cabinets of curiosity of early modern Europe, the museum as an institution proved integral to emerging concepts of nationhood during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The museum model then expanded rapidly over the course of the long 19th century in tandem with industrialization, colonialism, and imperialism intersecting as it did so with both novel and earlier modes of collecting and categorizing art and artefacts, the natural world, and human cultures. Museums were not places merely to see (and be seen), but institutions that actively shaped understandings of the historical past and its relationship to the present. Between the late 19th century and the interwar period, that present was one in which ideas about the relationship between nature and culture, and about human and cultural difference, were a prominent concern ideas that museums and their collections played a key role in formulating, materializing, and validating.
• This module takes Tony Bennetts concept of the exhibitionary complex as the starting point for considering the development of museums over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. It will equip students with an understanding of the earlier history of museums and some of the key debates and methodologies in museum studies. The module focuses on British institutions through a global lens, by considering how collecting, curating, and visiting practices were tied to colonial and imperial spheres of influence. Colonial ways of being, seeing, and thinking were thus integral to creating a historical imagination of recent and distant pasts.
• The module introduces students to the kinds of historiographic resources museums and their own institutional archives offer, as well as other kinds of primary sources annual reports, sales and exhibition catalogues, media coverage, publications by professional bodies that can form the basis of research on the history of museums and collecting. Students will also develop a critical awareness of the role museums continue to play as mediators of public history and other forms of knowledge.
• Different kinds of museums and collecting activities provide the focus for weekly seminars, to include the decorative arts and design (South Kensington Museum/V&A), archaeology and anthropology (the British Museum, Manchester Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum), and natural history (Natural History Museum, London; University Museum, Oxford). Seminars will also look at museums in Egypt and India, to evaluate what, if anything, changed in exporting the museum model from its (presumed) European origins to a colonial environs. From the global to the local, and back again, students will also have the opportunity to investigate the history of museums in Durham and the Northeast, and to weigh up how and whether museums today are using their own histories to address contemporary challenges.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• To acquire a broad knowledge of the history of the museum as a public institution, from its roots in the early modern era to its period of expansion in long 19th century;
• To relate the growth of museums to concurrent socioeconomic and political trends, in particular industrialization, colonialism and imperialism, and the gradual establishment of disciplinary specialisms;
• To explain the public role envisioned for museums by their founders and curators, and compare it to the impact of museums on their visitors from the 19th century to today;
• To understand the theoretical literature which has grown up around museums and the creation of knowledge, including postcolonial perspectives.

Subject-specific Skills:

• To recognize and historicize the different kinds of museums that developed over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries;
• To synthesize theoretical literature in museum studies with historical research on specific museums and collecting practices;
• To link developments in the museum field in Britain with a global context, specifically the colonial and imperial networks through which collections were formed and knowledge created.

Key Skills:

• To acquire the confidence to undertake their own research into the history of collecting and museums;
• To develop appropriate skills of analysis and interpretation for a range of primary sources, including museum architecture and display, archives, and collections;
• To evaluate the implications of the different methodologies scholars have used to interrogate the history of museums;
• To interrogate the link between museum and collecting histories and contemporary debates, such as the ownership of objects and the representation (or under-representation) of different groups, identities, and historical themes.
• http://www.dur.ac.uk/history.internal/local/PGModuleProformaMap/

• Classes will be taught through a mix of short lectures, seminar discussion, student presentations, and field-trips to relevant collections

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