Thomas Söderqvist On next Thursday, 15 November, museum and material culture scholar Sandra Dudley will speak about “The possibilities of things: an object-centred view and its implications for museums” at Medical Museion’s MUSE-seminar (abstract below).
Sandra Dudley has a background in anthropology, she has been, among other places, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, before coming to the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, where she is now Director of the school’s Exhibitions and Collections. She is also chief co-editor of the forthcoming new annual journal Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.
Among her edited books are Museum Materialities (Routledge 2010) which explores ways in which “things and people mutually interact, and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor”. She has recently published a reader on material culture studies and museums, titled Museum Objects (Routledge 2012).
Abstract:
This lecture considers some of the perspectives within the current interest in objects and materiality in museum contexts, before going on to exemplify aspects of the author’s own current work. Highlighting such issues as surface, qualia and displacement, the talk will discuss how this and other object-centred work augments and problematizes our understandings of museums, definable as those institutions are by their particular approaches to the conservation and re-contextualisations of things. Indeed, it will be argued, an object-centred view has profound implications for envisioning the possibilities of things.
The talk takes place Thursday 15 November, 3-4.30 pm in Medical Museion’s Auditorium in 62 Bredgade, Copenhagen, and is followed by nice snacks and (non)-alcoholic drinks in the reception room.
A video of the talk will be made available online shortly after the seminar. Link will appear here.
For earlier talks in the MUSE-seminar series, see here.
