new books, articles etc

Caterina Albano is one of those interesting combined scholars-curators, who works on topics that any medical museum director would love to include in the portfolio. Having a PhD background in Renaissance Studies, Albano focuses her research and curatorial work on projects that relate bioscience, art and culture and explore topics like the unconscious, the history […]

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 […]

Why write about the life and work of contemporary biomedical and life scientists? What is the use of the genre of biography for understanding contemporary biomedicine? Is it just history by other means, or does biography writing have other uses as well? In an article titled “The Seven Sisters: Subgenres of Bioi of Contemporary Life […]

Keep on eye open on the journal Heritage & Society (a refurbishment of the only three-year old Heritage Management), edited out of the Center for Heritage & Society at the University of Massachussetts, which will provide a forum for scholarly, professional, and community reflection on the cultural, political, and economic impacts of heritage on contemporary society: […]

Many of us probably believe that participatory media is something new. But in the newly published History of Participatory Media: Politics and Publics, 1750–2000 (edited by Anders Ekström, Solveig Jülich, Frans Lundgren, and Per Wisselgren, Routledge, 2010) it is argued that “scholarly discussions on participatory media … are all too often obscured by a rhetoric […]

Tiffany Jenkins is soon coming out with a book titled Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority in Routledge’s ‘Research in Museum Studies’ series. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic work, and media and policy documents, the book analyzes, says Routledge’s announcement, “the influences at play on the contestation over human remains, and examines the social construction of […]

The recently published Technology and Medical Practice: Blood, Guts and Machines, edited by Ericka Johnson och Boel Berner (Ashgate), might be interesting reading for medical museum curators. Says the blurb: The advanced technologies being used in diagnosis and care within modern medicine, whilst supporting and making medical practices possible, may also conflict with established traditions […]

All of us who have been following Nina’s blog about museum 2.0 are happy to hear that her book project about visitor participation in museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries has come to a temporary end. She describes The Participatory Museum as “a practical guide to visitor participation … the nuts and bolts of successful […]

A new book titled Transnational Lives (eds., Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) discusses how the transnationalism of lives “threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography”. As the editors point out in the blurb, nationality has been determined by “complex combinations of birthplace, […]

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 […]

Two years ago, in January 2007, our own Susanne Bauer co-organised a meeting titled ‘Contested Categories’ here at Medical Museion. Now, a proceedings volume with the same title, co-edited by Susanne and Ayo Wahlberg (formerly BIOS, LSE), has been published by Ashgate. From the back cover: Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that […]

A year ago, Adam and I made fun of the tendency in the humanities and social sciences to invent ‘turns’ — the linguistic turn, the bodily turn, etc. (see earlier posts here and here). But some ‘turns’ are more justified than others. Melissa Littlefield at the University of Illinois and Jenell Johnson at the Louisiana State University have […]