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In recent years, many museums have implemented sweeping changes in how they engage audiences. However, changes to the field’s approaches to collections stewardship have come much more slowly. Active Collections critically examines existing approaches to museum collections and explores practical, yet radical, ways that museums can better manage their collections to actively advance their missions. Approaching the question of modern museum collection stewardship from a position of "tough love," the authors argue that the museum field risks being constrained by rigid ways of thinking about objects. Examining the field’s relationship to objects, artifacts, and specimens, the volume explores the question of stewardship through the dissection of a broad range of issues, including questions of "quality over quantity," emotional attachment, dispassionate cataloging, and cognitive biases in curatorship. The essays look to insights from fields as diverse as forest management, library science, and the psychology of compulsive hoarding, to inform and innovate collection practices. Essay contributions come from both experienced museum professionals and scholars from disciplines as diverse as psychology, education, and history. The result is a critical exploration that makes the book essential reading for museum professionals, as well as those in training.
In this essay, I look first at the history of hoarding and bring this discourse up to date to examine the recent pathologization of hoarding as a mental disease through its 2013 acceptance into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Second, because my interest is specifically in textiles, I examine the mass accumulation of yarn, textiles and other goods by crafters. Though fabric and yarn stashes can result in feelings of guilt, they are also understood as storehouses, loaded with the memories of past handmade items and the potential for future projects. Descriptions even of these excessive craft hoards complicate understandings of hoarding as a ‘curable’ mental illness. Third, I consider how a number of contemporary artists have used hoarding and/or the representation of hoards as a strategy to address excess, waste, emotional attachments to objects, and overconsumption. In the final section of the chapter, I bring these threads together to ask whether the increasing presence of hoarding is simply symptomatic of changing patterns of consumption, and whether “hoarding [is] less of a mental illness located in the brain and more of a socialized phenomenon located in the world at large.”. In other words, given the ease of accumulation under late capitalism, is it possible to think about hoarding as a creative response to the amount of stuff circulating in the world as much as it is a pathology? And can we do this by acknowledging that the line between hoarding and over-consumption is a porous one, granted seeming impermeability only insofar as the ambient accumulation of material objects symptomatic of late capitalism is pushed to the background? My overall goal here is to complicate the over-simplified discourse around hoarding through a discussion of the pleasures and guilt of ownership, collecting, and use. A shorter version of this essay will be published in the book Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade, Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, eds. Expected publication 2017.
History News, 2011
This essay uses Steven Conn’s recent book Do Museums Still Need Objects?, as a jumping-off point for considering seven major issues currently confronting history museums and historic sites as they seek to make their collections meaningful, relevant, and accessible for a general audience.
Germans have been involved with the Dutch colonial and trading activities in Southeast Asia for centuries. Even the well-known medical doctors and Japan-scholars Caspar Schamberger (1623-1706), Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716) and Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), actually worked for the “Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie” (VOC), better known as Dutch East India Company at its famous trading post Deshima in Nagasaki harbor, thus creating some triangle relationship between Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan. In this paper I want to briefly introduce the post-WWI activities of Germans in Dutch East India itself, focusing on their working experiences as well as on the outpost of the Tokyo-based German East Asiatic Society in Batavia (1934-40). The main part of the paper will deal with the internment of all Germans in the Dutch colony after the occupation of the Netherlands by the Third Reich in late spring 1940. While women and children were subsequently allowed to leave the colony either for Shanghai or Japan, German men remained in camps until they were transferred to Ceylon in early 1942. As this was a few months after the Pearl Harbor attacks, one of the three transport ships, the Van Imhoff, was actually sunk during this transfer by a Japanese plane, killing about 480 Germans onboard. Most likely, this was the highest number of German casualties in the Pacific theatre of war at one stroke, ironically killed by the Third Reich’s axis partner Japan. After WWII, it became clear that the Dutch crew of the Van Imhoff saved itself without providing any support to the Germans in their custody, causing some uproar in the mid-1960s when the case was discussed in West-German media. The aim of this paper is to remind the audience of the cooperation of Germans with Dutch colonialism and the fact that Japan was more than once the third party involved, by providing the working space for some German VOC-employees from the 17th to the 19th century, by accepting hundreds of German refugees from the Dutch colony in 1941 and by tragically killing 480 Germany on a Dutch transport ship in February 1942.
Phytoliths are becoming an increasingly important tool in archaeological, forensic, paleontological, and nanotechnological research. Deborah Pearsall has been a pioneer in emphasizing the importance of understanding phytolith production patterns and in discovering phytolith types that can be used to reconstruct various aspects of human/plant interactions. In this project, I analyzed 354 samples from 181 select non-grass species commonly encountered in Southwest Asian archaeological soils. Southwest Asia has played a pivotal role throughout history and prehistory due in large part to its geographic location at the intersection of Asia, Africa, and Europe. To date, the majority of phytolith research in this region has focused on understanding production patterns in plants commonly consumed by humans. This project was focused on understanding phytolith production patterns in non-grass, predominately weedy taxa. The results of this study have added to the growing body of knowledge surrounding phytolith production in general and helped to clarify what species do and do not produce phytoliths in Southwest Asia.
Le notizie pervenuteci su Trifone Gabriel consentono di inquadrare il personaggio tra i grandi eruditi del XVI secolo. È indubbio, infatti, che egli – nonostante conducesse una vita ritirata e meditativa – avesse messo in piedi una prestigiosa scuola per giovani umanisti. Ne fanno menzione Daniello nella sua Spositione del ‘41 e lo Speroni, il quale nel Dialogo della Retorica fa raccontare ad Antonio Brocardo come quest’ultimo sia stato guidato nell’apprendimento del Petrarca proprio da Gabriel. Prova di ciò è l’incunabolo Vaticano Rossiano 710, un Petrarca con marginalia e note autografe di Brocardo, prese sotto la guida di Gabriel (doctissimo Triphone interpretante). La cattiva qualità di scrittura, la presenza di più mani, le cancellature rendono i lavori sul tale postillato non facili. Gli studi in merito (per lo più materiali) non abbozzano neppure la possibilità di un’edizione, che a mio avviso non è solo fattibile, ma anche più che mai opportuna.
The fortifications of Famagusta, the largest port of Renaissance Cyprus, initially rose between 1308 and 1372 on orders from the Lusignan, the island’s ruling French family, and following Papal indulgences for their hastened completion. The chain of sociopolitical events that shaped Famagusta’s history under the subsequent rules of Genoa (1373-1464) and Venice (1489-1571) necessitated substantial modifications to the physical disposition of the city’s waterfront castle, walls, fifteen towers and three gates. This paper interprets the defensive structures of Famagusta both as barriers that fragmented the city and its surrounding area into distinct territories, and as a network of interconnected spaces that gave the city its unified character and urban form. The city’s fortifications are shown to have not only functioned as inseparable parts of its military history, but also to have shaped the everyday life experiences of its diversified ethno-linguistic populace, and to have commanded Famagusta’s changing tyche or fortune.
2014
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, in Washington, DC, is an institute of Harvard University dedicated to supporting scholarship internationally in Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape Studies through fellowships, meetings, exhibitions, and publications. Located in Georgetown and bequeathed by Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss, Dumbarton Oaks welcomes scholars to consult its books, images, and objects, and the public to visit its garden, museum, and historic house for lectures and concerts.
Journal of Museum Education, 2013
Curator: The Museum Journal. Vol 56. Iss: 1., 2013
Journal of Documentation, 2016
Collections: A Journal for Museum Archives and Professionals, 2015
Routledge , 2019
Archival Science, 2016
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 2009
Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures 38.2, 2014
Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces : Exhibiting Asian Religions in Museums, ed. Bruce M. Sullivan, 2015
Current Archeology in Texas, 2010
Library trends, 1988
Library and Information History Newsletter, 2016
American Archivists 74(1): 185-210., 2011