Mirjam Brusius
I am a cultural historian with an interest in visual and material culture in global and colonial contexts. I hold an MA in Art History, Cultural Studies and Musicology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge.
My research and curatorial work focuses on the circulation of objects and images in and between Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia; from the movement of ancient artefacts in indigenous contexts in the Ottoman Empire and Persia into the racial hierarchies and archives of Western museums, to the trajectories of photographic technologies out of Europe and into the Islamicate world. My projects expand traditional fields of heritage studies by combining critical material culture research with an understanding of global and colonial history, cross-cultural ‘object biographies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and curatorial practice.
I am currently a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London. Prior to this, I was a Fulbright Scholar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, followed by an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (Faculty of History) and a Junior Research Fellowship (Trinity College) at the University of Oxford. I was also awarded fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (MPI), the Yale Center for British Art, the University of Sydney and Melbourne, Columbia University (Italian Academy of Advanced Study), as well as HU (CARMAH) and FU (Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies and TOPOI) in Berlin.
I am currently finalizing several book projects. The first, to be published by Oxford University Press, examines the value of Middle Eastern archaeological objects during the transition period on their way to Europe via India when the finds were in transit and seemed to have no status. The project investigates the subsequent processes of appropriation upon their arrival in the leading museums of Paris, London and Berlin in the context of race science, colonialism, and anti-colonial resistance. The book builds on a number of peer-reviewed articles and special issues on the destruction and preservation of ‘heritage’ in the Middle East.
I am also writing a popular book on the overlooked fact that the majority of museum collections are held out of sight, a follow-up to Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt (2018).
A further forthcoming monograph (The University of Chicago Press) is a capacious study of the inventor of photography William Henry Fox Talbot in the context of the British Empire, science, antiquarianism, and questions of the ‘archive’. The book expands my earlier work on Talbot, amongst it the edited volume ‘W.H.F. Talbot: Beyond Photography’ (with Katrina Dean and Chitra Ramalingam), published by Yale University Press in 2013, and an award-winning monograph (De Gruyter 2015), which examined a vast amount of unknown archival material.
My research has lead to the Aby Warburg Prize for Early Career Researchers, the Jacob Bronowski Award for Science and the Arts of the British Science Association, and Maurice Daumas Prize of the International Committee for the History of Technology for the best article in the history of technology.
In 2022 I won the prestigious Dan David Prize ($ 300 000), which I intend to use for collaborative work with scholars in the Global South.
I have taught courses in the UK and Germany, have and supervised and examined graduate theses at UCL, and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney, and Melbourne. I am happy to discuss potential dissertation topics with prospective students.
In 2023/24 I will teach as a Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
As a former AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award holder at the British Library and a Mellon Fellow at the Bodleian Library, I also developed curatorial expertise and interests: How can research on the history of collecting lead to efficient museum critique and new thinking in curatorial practice today? As such, I am a member of the network 'Museumdetox', and a founding project leader of '100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object' (https://100histories100worlds.org), an award-winning collaborative digital grassroots publication project, which aims at diversifying object biographies by foregrounding voices of people of colour and scholars from the Global South. In 2021, I was Principal Investigator of the Project 'The 4Rs in Africa (restitution, return, repatriation and reparation): Reality or Transcultural Aphasia?', based at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana in Legon, Accra.
As a member of the Global Young Academy and a regular contributor to major broadcasting programmes and newspapers in Germany and the UK, I am also concerned with communicating my research to a broader public. I am @MidEastInEurope on x and Bluesky.
Supervisors: Prof Simon Schaffer and Prof Eleanor Robson
My research and curatorial work focuses on the circulation of objects and images in and between Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia; from the movement of ancient artefacts in indigenous contexts in the Ottoman Empire and Persia into the racial hierarchies and archives of Western museums, to the trajectories of photographic technologies out of Europe and into the Islamicate world. My projects expand traditional fields of heritage studies by combining critical material culture research with an understanding of global and colonial history, cross-cultural ‘object biographies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and curatorial practice.
I am currently a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London. Prior to this, I was a Fulbright Scholar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, followed by an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (Faculty of History) and a Junior Research Fellowship (Trinity College) at the University of Oxford. I was also awarded fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (MPI), the Yale Center for British Art, the University of Sydney and Melbourne, Columbia University (Italian Academy of Advanced Study), as well as HU (CARMAH) and FU (Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies and TOPOI) in Berlin.
I am currently finalizing several book projects. The first, to be published by Oxford University Press, examines the value of Middle Eastern archaeological objects during the transition period on their way to Europe via India when the finds were in transit and seemed to have no status. The project investigates the subsequent processes of appropriation upon their arrival in the leading museums of Paris, London and Berlin in the context of race science, colonialism, and anti-colonial resistance. The book builds on a number of peer-reviewed articles and special issues on the destruction and preservation of ‘heritage’ in the Middle East.
I am also writing a popular book on the overlooked fact that the majority of museum collections are held out of sight, a follow-up to Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt (2018).
A further forthcoming monograph (The University of Chicago Press) is a capacious study of the inventor of photography William Henry Fox Talbot in the context of the British Empire, science, antiquarianism, and questions of the ‘archive’. The book expands my earlier work on Talbot, amongst it the edited volume ‘W.H.F. Talbot: Beyond Photography’ (with Katrina Dean and Chitra Ramalingam), published by Yale University Press in 2013, and an award-winning monograph (De Gruyter 2015), which examined a vast amount of unknown archival material.
My research has lead to the Aby Warburg Prize for Early Career Researchers, the Jacob Bronowski Award for Science and the Arts of the British Science Association, and Maurice Daumas Prize of the International Committee for the History of Technology for the best article in the history of technology.
In 2022 I won the prestigious Dan David Prize ($ 300 000), which I intend to use for collaborative work with scholars in the Global South.
I have taught courses in the UK and Germany, have and supervised and examined graduate theses at UCL, and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney, and Melbourne. I am happy to discuss potential dissertation topics with prospective students.
In 2023/24 I will teach as a Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
As a former AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award holder at the British Library and a Mellon Fellow at the Bodleian Library, I also developed curatorial expertise and interests: How can research on the history of collecting lead to efficient museum critique and new thinking in curatorial practice today? As such, I am a member of the network 'Museumdetox', and a founding project leader of '100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object' (https://100histories100worlds.org), an award-winning collaborative digital grassroots publication project, which aims at diversifying object biographies by foregrounding voices of people of colour and scholars from the Global South. In 2021, I was Principal Investigator of the Project 'The 4Rs in Africa (restitution, return, repatriation and reparation): Reality or Transcultural Aphasia?', based at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana in Legon, Accra.
As a member of the Global Young Academy and a regular contributor to major broadcasting programmes and newspapers in Germany and the UK, I am also concerned with communicating my research to a broader public. I am @MidEastInEurope on x and Bluesky.
Supervisors: Prof Simon Schaffer and Prof Eleanor Robson
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Books by Mirjam Brusius
De Gruyter, 2015
E-book: https://books.google.de/books?id=NoE_CgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false
Special issues and Roundtables by Mirjam Brusius
Papers by Mirjam Brusius
that archive and curate them, and the uses to which they are put in the
work of heritage preservation, with particular attention paid to the
ways in which these have been mobilized in Middle Eastern heritage
debates. Photographs, often depicting uninhabited rather than populated
heritage landscapes, in effect weaponize heritage preservation, ignoring
the fact that individuals and communities have always had their own
ways of preserving and engaging with the material past. The authors
therefore seek to reconsider the disciplinary genealogies embedded in
a photographic archive shaped by instruments of Western ideology and
power – archaeological fieldwork, surveys and museum-building – to
question the uncritical use of photography for the assessment of heritage
significance, the construction of heritage value and management of
heritage assemblages today. They argue that identifying and creating
counter-archives is necessary to contribute to more inclusive narratives
fostering heritage justice, including a deeper engagement
with archaeology’s long-standing entanglements with exploitative labour.
Keywords: archaeology • archives • colonialism • heritage justice •
photography • Middle East • museums
Many museum collections of non-Western artefacts, including those from ‘Ancient Mesopotamia’ (today’s Iraq), are products of imperial expansion. As such they play crucial roles in producing concepts of historical narratives, ethnicity, racial identity and difference. Current displays of Mesopotamian artefacts, for example, suggest a period of decline from the birth of Islam onwards, while European narratives link their historical present to mythical beginnings in the Middle East. Many European museums thus show the Middle East’s past as ‘their own’ (European) history, in relation to narratives of the ‘cradle of civilization’ that first had to be ‘discovered’ by European archaeologists in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the excavations that were foundational for many collections are still rendered as triumphalist and heroic stories. As a result, ancient artefacts are historically disconnected from other histories, including Europe’s imperial endeavours, and the resulting conflicts in the Middle East today. This chapter poses questions about the decolonization of archaeological artefacts from this region in European museums. Whose story are they meant to tell, and which stories are left out? What could be done to respond to the demands of those who ask for new narratives that also reflect other senses of belonging and inclusion?
Tangible “heritage” (artifacts, buildings, and sites) has always played key roles in identity and nation-building in the Middle East. As countries in the Middle East face unprecedented disorder and violence we lack more nuanced answers to what preservation was, is, and what it can be in the future. This roundtable—initiated as a session at the Middle East Studies Association's annual meeting in 2016—offers a much-needed perspective and critical voice in a debate that has become increasingly monolithic. In other words, current notions of what “cultural heritage” is and how it should be preserved are limited and often dismiss the limitations, complexities and ironies of iconoclasm. Objects seen as valuable by some but “idolatrous” to others, for example, have sometimes been destroyed precisely because they were considered worthy of preservation by opposing parties. Further, preservation and destruction were rarely exclusive binaries, but rather connected and identified in crucial ways. They are, in other words, two sides of the same coin: Archaeological excavation has destroyed buildings and deposits in strata above selected layers or artifacts, often removing sites that are meaningful in other ways, such as Islamic shrines.
Can objects be data? Under what conditions do they become data? Looking at the Prussian-led excavations in Babylon around 1900, this essay will investigate pro- cesses of knowledge production in relation to archaeological objects between their excavation and their incorporation in museum collections. It will focus on the na- ture of the connection between data and the physical objects they represent. How much data does an object yield when it is “found”? What role do epistemic practices, such as the application of visual media in the field and the museum, play in turning objects into data? And finally, will the data remain the same once the objects have reached their final destination?
This article investigates the relationship between ancient objects and their visual depiction in British archaeological expeditions in the Middle East in the mid- nineteenth century. The article focuses on the exploration of Ancient Mesopotamia initiated by the British adventurer Austen Henry Layard. Modern scholarship on Layard’s excavations and their reception in Europe has mostly presented them as well-organised, purposive, and logical enterprises in which finding objects and depicting them had a clear, well-defined purpose. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the excavated items were initially objects without a clear status, even after they had arrived in Europe. This article examines how the application of visual media – whether used for scholarship or for publicity – in the field and the museum reflected this uncertainty. In this context, photography as a new medium entered the chaos of the field and the museum as one among several media that brought along its own insecurities rather than a tool ready and able to solve a problem.
De Gruyter, 2015
E-book: https://books.google.de/books?id=NoE_CgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de#v=onepage&q&f=false
that archive and curate them, and the uses to which they are put in the
work of heritage preservation, with particular attention paid to the
ways in which these have been mobilized in Middle Eastern heritage
debates. Photographs, often depicting uninhabited rather than populated
heritage landscapes, in effect weaponize heritage preservation, ignoring
the fact that individuals and communities have always had their own
ways of preserving and engaging with the material past. The authors
therefore seek to reconsider the disciplinary genealogies embedded in
a photographic archive shaped by instruments of Western ideology and
power – archaeological fieldwork, surveys and museum-building – to
question the uncritical use of photography for the assessment of heritage
significance, the construction of heritage value and management of
heritage assemblages today. They argue that identifying and creating
counter-archives is necessary to contribute to more inclusive narratives
fostering heritage justice, including a deeper engagement
with archaeology’s long-standing entanglements with exploitative labour.
Keywords: archaeology • archives • colonialism • heritage justice •
photography • Middle East • museums
Many museum collections of non-Western artefacts, including those from ‘Ancient Mesopotamia’ (today’s Iraq), are products of imperial expansion. As such they play crucial roles in producing concepts of historical narratives, ethnicity, racial identity and difference. Current displays of Mesopotamian artefacts, for example, suggest a period of decline from the birth of Islam onwards, while European narratives link their historical present to mythical beginnings in the Middle East. Many European museums thus show the Middle East’s past as ‘their own’ (European) history, in relation to narratives of the ‘cradle of civilization’ that first had to be ‘discovered’ by European archaeologists in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the excavations that were foundational for many collections are still rendered as triumphalist and heroic stories. As a result, ancient artefacts are historically disconnected from other histories, including Europe’s imperial endeavours, and the resulting conflicts in the Middle East today. This chapter poses questions about the decolonization of archaeological artefacts from this region in European museums. Whose story are they meant to tell, and which stories are left out? What could be done to respond to the demands of those who ask for new narratives that also reflect other senses of belonging and inclusion?
Tangible “heritage” (artifacts, buildings, and sites) has always played key roles in identity and nation-building in the Middle East. As countries in the Middle East face unprecedented disorder and violence we lack more nuanced answers to what preservation was, is, and what it can be in the future. This roundtable—initiated as a session at the Middle East Studies Association's annual meeting in 2016—offers a much-needed perspective and critical voice in a debate that has become increasingly monolithic. In other words, current notions of what “cultural heritage” is and how it should be preserved are limited and often dismiss the limitations, complexities and ironies of iconoclasm. Objects seen as valuable by some but “idolatrous” to others, for example, have sometimes been destroyed precisely because they were considered worthy of preservation by opposing parties. Further, preservation and destruction were rarely exclusive binaries, but rather connected and identified in crucial ways. They are, in other words, two sides of the same coin: Archaeological excavation has destroyed buildings and deposits in strata above selected layers or artifacts, often removing sites that are meaningful in other ways, such as Islamic shrines.
Can objects be data? Under what conditions do they become data? Looking at the Prussian-led excavations in Babylon around 1900, this essay will investigate pro- cesses of knowledge production in relation to archaeological objects between their excavation and their incorporation in museum collections. It will focus on the na- ture of the connection between data and the physical objects they represent. How much data does an object yield when it is “found”? What role do epistemic practices, such as the application of visual media in the field and the museum, play in turning objects into data? And finally, will the data remain the same once the objects have reached their final destination?
This article investigates the relationship between ancient objects and their visual depiction in British archaeological expeditions in the Middle East in the mid- nineteenth century. The article focuses on the exploration of Ancient Mesopotamia initiated by the British adventurer Austen Henry Layard. Modern scholarship on Layard’s excavations and their reception in Europe has mostly presented them as well-organised, purposive, and logical enterprises in which finding objects and depicting them had a clear, well-defined purpose. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the excavated items were initially objects without a clear status, even after they had arrived in Europe. This article examines how the application of visual media – whether used for scholarship or for publicity – in the field and the museum reflected this uncertainty. In this context, photography as a new medium entered the chaos of the field and the museum as one among several media that brought along its own insecurities rather than a tool ready and able to solve a problem.
In return, the French were in the possession of photographs of fragments from Nineveh that were lost by the British. This essay will re-examine British-Franco relations in the history of archaeology in Mesopotamia against the backdrop of
the use and exchange of images, which became the only and major records in a story of rivalry, dependence, loss of objects and control. Not only did objects and images wonder between the two countries, but also new visual recording
techniques such as photography, which were not necessarily deployed in the country of their « origin », but across the channel.
En Mésopotamie au milieu des années 1850, des sculptures assyriennes découvertes par la délégation française ont disparu dans le Tigre. Il n’en ait resté qu’un ensemble de dessins faits par l’artiste britannique William Boutcher
durant l’expédition anglaise. Les Français, quant à eux, étaient en possession de photographies de fragments archéologiques en provenance de Ninive, perdus par les Britanniques. Dans le cadre de l’histoire de l’archéologie en Mésopotamie,
cet article va tenter de retracer l’état des relations franco-britanniques dans le contexte particulier d’échanges et d’utilisation des images. Images qui deviennent
le support d’une histoire de rivalité, de dépendance réciproque, de perte et de contrôle des trouvailles.
Ten years on and the world has changed. Museums are under increasing pressure to decolonise, to repatriate and to better represent. Our project turns to the formerly subaltern stories museums in ‘the West’ have left out. How can previously excluded voices be empowered to tell their own histories about these objects? This dynamic, long-term and multiple format publication project hopes to achieve more than an alternative history of the British Museum. Instead we will work towards a fusion of object stories and present legacies in museums through and with scholars, curators, and artists in and from the ‘Global South’. Our ‘new histories’ must be not just different methodologically and multilingual, but also dynamic and open for additions and narratives that others might want to add in future.
Together we can show that one museum object can have 100 histories and exist in 100 worlds.
This workshop brought together 15 scholars from 15 different countries, to reflect on a selection of the original 100 Objects and experiment with ways to move beyond them in material, archival, and philosophical terms.
Concept and Convenor:
Mirjam Brusius (German Historical Institute London)
Organised by:
Forum Transregionale Studien and Max Weber Foundation in cooperation with the GHI London, the University College London (Alice Stevenson, Subhadra Das), and the University of the West Indies, Mona (James Robertson)
Funded by: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany
We are grateful for the administrative support provided by the German Historical Institute London and the University of the West Indies, Mona.
Telling the Complex Stories of One Museum Object
02.03.2021
Mirjam Brusius and Ulrike Lindner talk about new ways to include marginalized voices into the discussion on heritage and museums. They address the importance of acknowledging academic as well as non-academic forms of knowledge in order to tell different stories and to make them more accessible to wider audiences. As a means to move forward in a new direction, Mirjam Brusius introduces the project “100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object”, that she coordinates among others with Benjamina Efua Dadzie and Alice Stevenson.
This interview is part of our new “Museums in Motion Workshop Series”. Contributions in the form of podcasts will be uploaded every Tuesday. The series curates dialogues about the future of museums and colonial collections in a global context. Conceived as a workshop, it presents conversations in an ongoing debate with scholars, curators, activists and others across space.
This podcast is the beginning of a generating dialogue between museums, and scholars and curators in and from the ‘Global South’. We will pose the next set of questions in our upcoming series, World Cafés.
This workshop brought together 15 scholars from 15 different countries, to reflect on a selection of the original 100 Objects and experiment with ways to move beyond them in material, archival, and philosophical terms.
Concept and Convenor: Mirjam Brusius (German Historical Institute London)
Organised by:
Forum Transregionale Studien and Max Weber Foundation in cooperation with the GHI London, the University College London (Alice Stevenson, Subhadra Das), and the University of the West Indies, Mona (James Robertson)
Funded by: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany
We are grateful for the administrative support provided by the German Historical Institute London and the University of the West Indies, Mona.
Die derzeitigen Geschichtsdebatten sollten sich dafür öffnen, dass Deutschland Einwanderungsland ist. Das Ergebnis wäre mehr, nicht weniger Holocaust-Erinnerung
Im vergangenen Sommer holten Demonstranten in Bristol die Statue des Sklavenhändlers Edward Colston von ihrem Sockel und versenkten sie im Hafen. Ein Gespräch über die Folgen mit der Kolonialhistorikerin Mirjam Brusius.
This is an edited (and shorter) translation of my original essay which appeared here: http://newfascismsyllabus.com/category/opinions/the-catechism-debate/
Dirk Moses' "German Catechism" essay can be found here: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/
Dirk Moses Essay was published here: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/.
Geschichte der Gegenwart also published a German translation of my response: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/steine-koennen-antworten-vergangenheitsbewaeltigung-revisited/
TiG-06 is co-hosted by Moshtari Hilal, Sinthujan Varatharajah and Candice Breitz
BREAKDOWN:
TiG-06 / "Menschen mit Nazihintergrund"
Release Date: 16.04.2021
Total Contributors Invited: 205
Davon Kartoffeln/Weiß: 101
BEHIND THE SCENES:
Episode Concept: Breitz + Hilal + Varatharajah
Above Text: Breitz + Hilal + Varatharajah
Design + Sound: Alex Fahl
Production: Alex Fahl
TiG can also be followed:
Via Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/this.is.germany/?igshid=e8q0zyplfma3
Podcast: https://100histories100worlds.org/vying-for-museum-space/
Opening plenary panel discussion on Archives, Heritage, Museums and Black Lives Matter featuring Benjamina Dadzie (Museum Detox), Subhadra Das (University College London), Aleema Gray (Museum of London), Keith Magee (Social Justice Institute; Founding Director of the US National Public Housing Museum; University College London; Newcastle University) and Wayne Modest (National Museum of World Culture; Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam).
How many stories can a museum object have? Our departure point is the 2010 BBC Radio 4 programme (and subsequent book) A History of the World in 100 Objects narrated by then British Museum Director Neil MacGregor. Providing a colossal platform for the British Museum, the project reinstated the idea of the museum as a ‘view from nowhere’ and everywhere at the same time. It was presented as a place to see the world; yet without any reflection on how the institution itself obtained and reframed the objects in order to create its own seemingly universal narrative.
Ten years on and the world has changed. Museums are under increasing pressure to decolonise, to repatriate and to better represent. Our project turns to the formerly subaltern stories museums in ‘the West’ have left out. How can previously excluded voices be empowered to tell their own histories about these objects? This dynamic, long-term and multiple format publication project hopes to achieve more than an alternative history of the British Museum. Instead we will work towards a fusion of object stories and present legacies in museums through and with scholars, curators, and artists in and from the ‘Global South’. Our ‘new histories’ must be not just different methodologically and multilingual, but also dynamic and open for additions and narratives that others might want to add in future.
Together we can show that one museum object can have 100 histories and exist in 100 worlds
BMBF funded Workshop in collaboration with the Forum Transregional Studies Berlin and the University of the West Indies 2019 (in collaboration with Subhadra Das, Alice Stevenson and James Robertson)
Conference Reports:
https://100histories100worlds.org/workshop/
Interview:
https://trafo.hypotheses.org/20851
Project Website:
https://100histories100worlds.org/
Videos:
Day 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q43Ity939Hs
Day 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmvOnnoio68
Programme:
https://heritage-research.org/events/ruins-preservation-symposium-rethinking-heritage-counter-archives/
Report:
https://www.ghil.ac.uk/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/bulletin/GHIL%20Bulletin%2042,1/GHIL%20Bulletin%2042%20%282020%29,1%20-%20090%20-%20Conference%20Reports%20-%20From%20the%20Ruins%20of%20Preservation.pdf
Interview:
https://trafo.hypotheses.org/18343
The vestiges of empire extend beyond standard conventions of physical control and coercion. It persists and proliferates in the present through representations and celebrations of the past. It manifests in statues, museum exhibits, artifact collections, embedded into public spaces and the individual's consciousness. Week 3's seminar will feature a panel discussion chaired by Mirjam Brusius - Early Career Researcher at TORCH, and featuring Paul Collins - Jaleh Hearn Curator of Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann - Assistant Professor of African Studies Hampshire College, Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz - Leverhulme Distinguished Professor University of Oxford, Rebecca Bridgeman - Curator of Islamic and South Asian Arts at Birmingham Museums Trust and a student speaker representing the University of Oxford, to discuss the legacy of empire in public spaces ranging from the statue of Cecil Rhodes, to the possession and presentation of artifacts and history in the Ashmolean Museum, and beyond. All are welcome and a light lunch will be provided.
Current crises involving the destruction of archaeological sites in the Middle East raise questions about the very concepts of preservation and ‘heritage’ and how it developed across the 19th and 20th century. To many archaeologists and heritage professionals, preserving these legacies seems an obvious and unproblematic goal, from artefacts in museums and storage magazines, to archaeological sites and monuments. But what counts as 'preservation', which objects or sites are preserved (or not), and who decides? So far only few challenge the idea that the preservation of heritage depends on the widely accepted ‘UNESCO approach’. At the level of the field site or monument, European preferences in heritage have held sway: Biblical sites such as Nimrud (Iraq) or Classical sites like Palmyra (Syria) are considered ‘shared heritage’, and their destruction receives far more public attention in Europe than the destruction of Islamic sites in the same region. In fact, Islamic material culture, critics have argued, is often considered at odds with dominant heritage preservation practices. Which role do conflicts of values play in these discussions? In this seminar, which will be opened through three brief statements by archaeologists and historians, we will discuss these questions against the backdrop of the variety of approaches, technologies and practices towards preservation by local institutions and people.
Discussants:
Prof Reinhard Bernbeck, FU/ Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie
Prof Susan Pollock, FU/ Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie
Prof Wendy Shaw, FU/ Kunsthistorisches Institut and BGSMCS
A one-day symposium on the subject of images, objects and data. Through eight short presentations from many different perspectives, this workshop will offer an occasion both to celebrate and to build upon the diversity of work surrounding images that is currently in progress across the wide spectrum of the University of Oxford. The workshop is free and all are welcome to attend, but places are limited, so please contact Clare Charlesworth (admin@hoa.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to come.
The symposium aims to reassess the study and the representation of the Middle East in scholarship and museums today. Studying the Middle East in the current Western academic and museological discourse entails encountering a history of dichotomies and contradictions. A manifest example, both physically and metaphorically, is provided by a visit to some art museums in the Western world: while, for example, art from ancient Mesopotamia – which occupied the same space as much of modern day Iraq, Syria and Iran – is often presented in direct proximity to objects deeply embedded in the Western canon, such as Classical Greek sculpture, objects from the very same region that derive from after the coming of Islam are often separated from their more ancient geographical counterparts, for instance in Islamic Art departments.
Thursday, 24 June to Saturday, 26 June 2010
Location: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) is remembered primarily as a
photographic pioneer and influential early voice on photographic
aesthetics, but his activities as a Victorian intellectual and gentleman
of science ranged widely across the natural sciences, classical
scholarship and Assyriology. This interdisciplinary conference will
approach Talbot's work with this wider perspective in mind, bringing
together art historians, curators, historians of science, and
practitioners of the many scholarly fields to which Talbot contributed. It
will situate Talbot against the networks and institutions of Victorian
intellectual enterprise, while raising basic questions about the relation
between photography and these other fields.
The occasion for this conference is the British Library's recent
acquisition of a large archive of Talbot's manuscripts, including research
notebooks, diaries, correspondence, and photographic prints. The majority
of papers delivered during this conference will present new research based
on the study of hitherto unexamined items in this collection. They will
explore such topics as Talbot's lifelong engagement with mathematics, his
successful attempts to decipher cuneiform scripts, his interest in
philology and literature, the meaning of his botanical specimens, and his
fascination with optical illusions and physiological optics. Contributions
on Talbot's photographic oeuvre will take into account the connections
between Talbot's invention of photography and his other scholarly and
scientific activities. Further papers will explore the historical context
of Talbot's Cambridge education at Trinity College and his habitual
practice of keeping research notebooks, in order to suggest how we might
understand the manuscripts as material records of an intellectual culture
and way of life that both enabled and constrained Talbot's activities. The
two keynote lectures, by James Elkins and Larry Schaaf, will explore the
conference's larger themes: the relationships between science, art and
photography, and Talbot's identity as a Victorian intellectual.
Programme: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1113/programme/
Exhibition
The conference will be accompanied by an exhibition (14 June to 9
July 2010, date tbc), displaying facsimiles of a selection of Talbot?s
manuscripts and photographs at the Wren Library, Trinity College
Cambridge, Talbot's former college.
Sponsors
This conference has been organised with the support of the British
Academy, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, The Mellon Centre for Disciplinary
Innovation (CDI) at CRASSH, The British Library and Trinity College Cambridge.
Convenors
Mirjam Brusius (History and Philosophy of Science, University of
Cambridge and the British Library)
Chitra Ramalingam (Mellon/ACLS Fellow, CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
Katrina Dean (Curator for the History of Science, British Library)
A more detailed report is accessible on the IEARN website:
http://iearn.iea-nantes.fr/focus-areas/museum-and-art-history/workshops/2014