museum studies

Is it really the case that almost all museum exhibitions dealing with medical themes these days are displaying DNA-images and colourful neuroscanning pictures? Well, at least this is what the organisers of a meeting in Dresden next April seem to be suggesting. I think they are exaggerating a bit :-). But that said, the theme […]

We are of course not the only museum that struggles with how to juggle art, science, materiality and medicine in our exhibitions. Next Friday, 4 December, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge is organising a most interesting afternoon symposium titled ‘Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination’. Curators and artistic contributors to MAA’s […]

Last year we had a discussion on this blog (see here and here) about whether objects ‘talk’ — no, they don’t! But do they ‘die’? The UCL-based Autopsies group (associated with Film Studies) suggests they do. The group runs a cultural studies project called “Autopsies: The Afterlife of Dead Objects” to explore this morbid issue. Here’s how they reason about the ‘death’ of objects: […]

An online-version of Adam’s, Camilla’s and my essay “Between meaning culture and presence effects: contemporary biomedical objects as a challenge to museums” is now available on the website of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Here’s the abstract of the paper: The acquisition and display of material artefacts is the raison d’être of museums. But what constitutes a […]

Too often during the last couple of years, when I believe I’ve come up with something new and creative with respect to museums, it turns out that Nina Simon has already been there. I feel like professor Otto Lidenbrock in Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth: “Arne Saknussemm, always Arne Saknussemm!”. Take for […]

The program for the Artefacts meeting at Science Museum, 20-22 September, has been finalised. It looks great! Medical Museion’s former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen (now at the Copenhagen City Museum) will present some of the ideas behind the current exhibition ‘Split+Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’. Here is the whole list of papers for the meeting: Bruce […]

Michael Kimmelman’s article in yesterday’s New York Times on why so few museum visitors seem to take their time to really look at things is inspirational. Not to mention the 419 readers’ comments. If you ever needed a set of arguments for the benefit of more intense looking in museums, here they are. Next question is — what […]

Anastasia Filippoupoliti at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece (afilipp@gmail.com) and Graeme Farnell at MuseumsEtc, UK (graeme@museumsetc.com) are soliciting papers for a forthcoming book that will explore: the processes involved in developing new science exhibitions in and for museums the issues involved in transforming scientific ideas or events into exhibitions the challenges faced by museums […]

While we’re at it, here is another interesting conference coming up. (See here or here for recent posts about interesting conferences.) The Danish research center DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials) have organized a one-day conference at Roskilde University, September 22nd 2009. At the conference there will be presentations about a.o. […]

Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, invites applications for a 3-year PhD/2-year postdoc position in the projekt ‘Communicative barriers between biomedical research and everyday health care in a museum context’: The increasingly important role of biomedical knowledge and advanced medical technologies in Western health systems is a challenge to the public communication of and engagement with […]

Interesting initiative — I am thinking of the launch of the Archives, Collections and Curatorship section of the Journal of Design History, which could be useful for those of us who work with the history of medical technological artefacts. The journal section wants authors to evaluate the relevance of an archive or collection as a resource for design […]

Make a note in your 2010 calendar already — for the 15th Congress of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS), which will be held here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, 17-19 September 2010. The congress theme revolves around the question: How can medical history museums contribute to the popular engagement in contemporary medicine and […]