Museum Studies Blog

By Syd Overtoom (he/they) Are you considering a museum career path? Have you been inspired by a museum education program or two to pursue this world of amazing work? Me, too! I’ve loved the different programs and educational materials I’ve experienced over the years. As we learned this week from Bonnie Sachatello-Sawyer et al. and …

By Peyton Reicherts “Sometimes you walk into a historic house museum looking for volunteer opportunities for college and then you spend the next three years playing the ghost of Jack the Ripper victim, Catherine Eddowes.” This is the beginning of the story I wrote to go along with the broken relationships and objects we came …

By Chloe Teall This week’s theme was one that I have really been looking forward to: community curation. We initiated class by trying to come up with our own working definition of community curation. In order to achieve a more complete understanding of how this practice can be done successfully, we looked to this week’s …

By Noah Nobbe   As a second-year public history master’s degree student, I have had many classes discussing museums and public history institutions and their role in public-facing, informal education. But before now, I had not had many chances to put any of that teaching to work, explore museum studies theory, or consider how to …

BY ELISE DAUGHERTY Nashville, Tennessee is iconic for its country music, nightlife, and food, and in early May, it was also host to the American Industrial Hygiene (AIH) Conference and Expo. As a museum studies student, I was asked many times why I was attending a conference for industrial hygienists and what IH had to …

By Bryn Foreman I was nervous when I sat down in class for the second week of Curatorial Practices. I had, of my own volition, signed up to do a spotlight presentation on Deborah Bright’s 2001 article, “Shopping the Leftovers: Warhol’s Collecting Strategies in Raid the Icebox I.” Better to just get it out of …

By Jennifer Mott From the thrilled look on my professor’s face at the beginning of our Museum Education class session, I could tell she had big news. However, I could not have guessed the amount of personal excitement that her news would bring me. Our discussion this week focused on some foundational questions that underlie …

By Allison Ford My first brush with academia in over 20 years found me seated in Curatorial practices. We began this week with “what is a curator” and an introduction to the Museum of Broken Relationships. We learned that often a curator is considered a specialist who cares for something, a person who fills in …