15th–16th June 2018, Musée des Arts et Métiers The international conference was held at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Across the two days, the conference was divided thematically between ‘The universalities of Western museums' and ‘Modern museum universalities', reflecting the project’s overarching aim of reassessing nineteenth-century museology from twenty-first century global perspectives. 15th … Continue reading INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE REPORT: ‘NOTIONS OF UNIVERSALITY IN UNIVERSAL MUSEUMS’
The final workshop of the ‘Universal Histories and Universal Museums’ project was held on 17th November at Université Paris Nanterre. Sandra Kemp, the project’s PI, opened the day introducing the project and the workshop’s themes. She began by summarising the overarching aim of the project: to develop a comparative critique of approaches to universal histories … Continue reading REPORTING FROM WORKSHOP THREE: ‘MUSEUM UNIVERSALITIES IN WESTERN CULTURAL CAPITALS IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY’
The second workshop of the 'Universal Histories and Universal Museums' research project was held on Wednesday 27th September at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. After a short welcome by André Delpuech, director of the Musée de l’Homme and research partner of the project, and an introduction to the project by Sandra Kemp, project principal … Continue reading Workshop report: ‘Comparative Museologies: Case studies from Asia’
Ten days ago, we held our first two-day ‘Universal Histories and Universal Museums’ (UHUM) project workshop, ‘The Evolution of the Museum’, at the Science Museum in London. The first day we were at Blythe House, which hosts the archives and part of the conservation sections and stores of the Science Museum, the V&A, and the British … Continue reading Reporting from our workshop ‘The Evolution of the Museum’
Blog post by Sandra Kemp, Project PI at the V&A, and Chiara Zuanni, postdoctoral researcher at the V&A. The Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac is one of our project partners and we have visited their collections and archives a number of times over the past year. Founded in 2006, the Museum has collections comprising … Continue reading Back at the Musée du quai Branly
Blog post by Sandra Kemp, project PI at the V&A, and Chiara Zuanni, postdoctoral researcher at the V&A. One of the objects we are researching is an Aztec sculpture representing Quetzalcoatl, the god of creation and fertility. This sculpture arrived in France in the early 19th century and was first displayed at the Musée Américaine … Continue reading Displaying Africa, Asia, Oceania and Americas at the Louvre: the Pavillon des Sessions
Blog post by Sandra Kemp, Project PI at the V&A, and Chiara Zuanni, postdoctoral researcher at the V&A. Hello, Paris! This week we are later with our usual blog update. The reason is that on Monday, we got on an earlier train to Paris for a full two weeks of archival research and exciting meetings … Continue reading Research in Paris: Musèe de l’Homme
Blog post by Chiara Zuanni, postdoctoral researcher at the V&A. In one of our previous posts, Sandra introduced one of the papers we are working on which focuses on an interdisciplinary and transnational comparison in order to explore how museums collecting and displaying practices and international fairs contributed to the making of knowledge in the late … Continue reading Exploring possible futures at the 1876 Loan Collection
Blog post by Sandra Kemp, V&A project Principal Investigator, on the AHRC/LABEX cross-project workshop on transnational interdisciplinary research. …Connections between the many become locally denser until at some point a threshold is reached and things begin to flow. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics 1, 2010, 157 Last week the AHRC/LABEX brought together researchers from its eight funded … Continue reading “Ideas in a different modality”: Interdisciplinarity and Transnationalism
Blog post by Chiara Zuanni, postdoctoral researcher at the V&A. Last week, I went with Sandra to the Horniman Museum to try to trace some objects we have encountered in our archival research. Although the Horniman Museum opened in 1901, collections acquired by the Horniman family have been on display since 1890 in their former … Continue reading A visit to the Horniman Museum