Museum Studies Blog

By Jacob Higgins Congratulations to Museum Studies certificate undergraduate student Camryn Bembry for earning the inaugural Undergraduate Scholar Award recent award at Temple University’s Barnes Conference! Camryn’s winning work examined the intersection of tribal identity and interracial conflict in the Choctaw Nation. It grew out of research she conducted as part of Dr. Holly Cusack-McVeigh’s …

Museums, Modernity and Conflict: Museums and Collections in and of War Since the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Kate Hill. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 2020. REVIEWED BY JASON HOUSLEY Commonly attributed to such varied personages as Winston Churchill, Herman Goring and Missouri Senator George Graham Vest, the aphorism ‘’History is written by the victors’’  pertains to the …

On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices edited by Sebastian Eduardo Dávila, Rebecca Hanna John, Ulrike Jordan, Thorsten Schneider, Judith Sieber, and Nele Wulff. Diaphanes & University of Chicago Press, 2023. REVIEWED BY GRACIE COLLIER Museums foremost serve the public, and all too often the public is considered only in …

A big congratulations to all of our students for another great semester! Our social media will be quiet over the break, but stay tuned for more great activity once we come back in January!  

Come join us on Zoom to discover what all of our graduate student interns have been researching over the semester! Each student has a lightning-fast 5 minutes to share what they have learned. Click on the image below to register!

By Syd Overtoom “Story encompasses many ways of knowing.” This was said by the American Evaluation Association President Corrie Whitmore on the first official day of the conference sessions, and it still sticks with me several days later. The AEA’s conference is for all evaluation, not just museum evaluation or visitor studies, but the theme …

Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology by Samuel J. Redman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. REVIEWED BY SARA POLK Gripping the nation from the very formation of the field of anthropology was the idea that Native peoples were disappearing, requiring white scientists to save their languages and material culture from a doomed nonexistence. …

The Art Museum in Modern Times by Charles Saumarez Smith. New York: Thames & Hudson, Inc., 2021. REVIEWED BY JENNIFER MOTT Charles Saumarez Smith’s The Art Museum in Modern Times serves as a type of reference for how museums have changed in the modern era. Smith, a respected Cultural Historian and former Director of both …