museum studies

I came to think about the role of narrativity in museum exhibitions when I saw the programme for the The Swedish National Exhibition Agency’s annual meeting in Visby last week. The aim of the Agency (Riksutställningar in Swedish) is to promote exhibition development. And since Sweden has a pretty strong, and internationally oriented, tradition for exhibition making, these meetings are a […]

Stefanie S. Jandl and Mark S. Gold are planning an edited volume tentatively titled Academic Museums, to be published by MuseumsEtc. next summer. The volume shall examine successful strategies, tactics and activities within the academic museum community internationally, and the editors are particularly interested in innovative practical experiences that can be applied within the wider museum community Their call […]

Universeum has grown into a potentially important organisation for the revival of European university museums. The annual meetings (the 12th was held in Padua last summer) could get an important role for raising the awareness among university administrations that their museums are not only worth preserving but, even better, worth expanding. I write “could get”, because — although I very […]

I’ve always felt making an exhibition was the equivalent to writing a book or making a work of art. In other words, I expect authors and artists to express their visions and ideas. I would never dream of writing or reading a book based on reader research (although I suspect some authors of popular crime novels do exactly […]

According to the Urban Dictionary, jizz is a slang word for the male semen. But bird-watchers sometimes use it in another meaning, namely to describe the overall ‘at-a-glance’ appearance of a bird that makes it possible to identify it in the field in a split-second. (There’s probably no connection between the two meanings of the word jizz :-). For birders, jizz is a combination […]

Alive I carry a picture of a dead woman’s head in my memory. My encounter with her took place in King’s College’s Gordon Museum in London on a sunny afternoon last spring. I don’t exaggerate if I say she had an enormous impact on me. She has forever burned an impression of herself onto my retina. This […]

The 16th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held in Berlin, 13-15 September 2012 on the theme “Hidden Stories: What do medical objects tell and how can we make them speak?”. Here’s the call for papers from Thomas Schnalke, director of the Berliner Medizinhistorisches […]

Eventually, the final program for the annual Artefacts meeting (this year in Leiden), has just been sent out. Three of us here at Medical Museion (Louise Whiteley, Niels Vilstrup and myself) are going — here are Louise’s and my abstracts: Louise Whiteley: Preserving the material culture of functional neuroimaging: Objects of process Functional neuroimaging research […]

We have just submitted an application for a major new gallery based on our anatomical and pathological specimen collections — and the in-house discussions are already becoming vigorous. How to find conceptually interesting ways to display cancer tumours, conjoined twins, and twisted torsos? What’s the balance between spectacular engagement and ethical concerns? How to make the historical collections […]

I was in London last week to attend a workshop organised by Robert Bud and the medical curatorial staff at London’s Science Museum. They had invited some 20 people from a variety of academic backgrounds to discuss the future redevelopment of their medical galleries. The day before the workshop we prepared ourselves by a guided tour to the present medical galleries: Science and […]