New Books in Museum Studies

Feb 02 2025 142 ep. 55 mins 44
New Books in Museum Studies Podcast artwork

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

  Arts  Education  History
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Yujie Zhu, "China’s Heritage through History: Reconfigured Pasts" (Routledge, 2024)

Feb 02 2025 47 mins  
China’s Heritage through History employs a longue durée approach to examine China’s heritage through history. From Imperial to contemporary China, it explores the role of practices and material forms of the past in shaping social transformation through knowledge production and transmission. The art of collecting, reproducing, and reinterpreting the past has been an enduring fo

Elizabeth Campbell, "Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 29 2025 58 mins  
Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting

Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)

Jan 19 2025 50 mins  
Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earlie

Jie Li, "Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era" (Duke UP, 2020)

Jan 04 2025 86 mins  
In Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020) Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations. Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialis

Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Jan 03 2025 63 mins  
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologi

Rachel Emily Taylor, "Illustration and Heritage" (Bloombury, 2024)

Dec 27 2024 27 mins  
In Illustration and Heritage (Bloomsbury, 2024), Rachel Emily Taylor explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a 'process' that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and

Erich Hatala Matthes, "What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Dec 19 2024 43 mins  
Today I’m speaking with Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. We are discussing his Oxford University Press, What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation (Oxford University Press, 2024). Erich’s book explores the idea of conservation: the practice of preserving

Jae Jennifer Rossman, "Access to Special Collections and Archives: Bridging Theory and Practice" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Dec 18 2024 70 mins  
Since the early 20th century, American academic libraries have collected and championed rare and unique non-circulating materials now referred to as special collections. Because of the rarity and value of these materials, they are handled differently than materials in other parts of academic library collections. Thus, a different set of access policies and procedures, as well as sp

Barbara A. Biesecker, "Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State" (Penn State Press, 2024)

Dec 13 2024 48 mins  
By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Barbara A. Bieseck

Jonathan Conlin, "The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Dec 07 2024 57 mins  
New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experienc