New Books in Museum Studies

Nov 16 2024 131 ep. 56 mins 22

New Books in Museum Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with authors and scholars about new books in museum studies.

Arts Education History

Copy RSS

Subscribe on Podcast Addict

Deborah Parker, "Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters" (Villa I Tatti, 2024)

Nov 16 2024 58 mins

In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first

Eunsong Kim, "The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property" (Duke UP, 2024)

Oct 12 2024 78 mins

In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press, 2024), Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popul

Alessandra Russo, "A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400-1600" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Sep 26 2024 63 mins

We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. In A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600 (Penn State University Press, 2024) Dr. Alessandra Russo argues otherwise. Instead of considering the European experience of “New World” artefacts and materials through the

John Schofield, "Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sep 15 2024 67 mins

'Wicked Problems' are those problems facing the planet and its inhabitants, present and future, which are hard (if not impossible) to resolve and for which bold, creative, and messy solutions are typically required. The adjective 'wicked' describes the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to be worse than the symptoms. Wicked

Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen, "Museums, Archives and Protest Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Sep 09 2024 59 mins

In Museums, Archives and Protest Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen address the emergence of ‘protest memory’ as a powerful contemporary shaper of ideas and practices in culture, media and heritage domains. Directly focused on the role of museum and archive practitioners in protest memory curation, they make a compelling contribution to our u

Elizabeth A. Wahler and Sarah C. Johnson, "Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Aug 28 2024 60 mins

Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to address growing numbers of high-needs

Dora Osborne, "What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture" (Camden House, 2020)

Aug 09 2024 62 mins

With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. Dora Osborne's book What Remains: The Post

Özge Çelikaslan, "Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma" (DPR Barcelona, 2024)

Jul 19 2024 39 mins

“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses ba

Laura Helton, "Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History" (Columbia UP, 2024)

May 22 2024 55 mins

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these instituti

Rubina Raja, "Shaping Archaeological Archives: Dialogues Between Fieldwork, Museum Collections, and Private Archives" (Brepols, 2023)

May 19 2024 38 mins

Archaeology as a discipline has undergone significant changes over the past decades, in particular concerning best practices for how to handle the vast quantities of data that the discipline generates. As Shaping Archaeological Archives: Dialogues between Fieldwork, Museum Collections, and Private Archives (Brepols, 2023) uncovers, much of this data has often ended up in physical -