Taught By
Jan Hennings and Marcell Sebök, CEU
Course Description
The course offers a comparative approach to the concepts, development, and history of organized collections from late antiquity through contemporary museums, exploring the historical contexts, ideals, and practices of private and public spaces of display and of collecting broadly conceived. The course offers a series of critical reflections on the etymology and genealogy of collections and aims at presenting the changing institutional frames and social conditions of displaying history, nature, art, and knowledge. The course looks at various examples of collecting from earlier manifestations such as the so-called cabinets of curiosities (Kunst- or Wunderkammern) to changing, concepts, attitudes, and perceptions in the evolution of institutional practices within the “museum space”. The course encompasses the beginnings of the first European museums (18th-19th century) and exhibitions dealing with questions of origin, ethnography, empire, colonialism, and national histories. Besides offering an overview of the historical development of modern museums through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the course also covers some core elements of contemporary practices of museum collections, including debates about museums and public history, the construction of collective identities, memory politics, new collecting agendas, repatriation, and missions of museums in the digiatl age.
Learning Outcomes
1. Developing a critical understanding of collecting practices in different historical contexts, and inter-related social/cultural phenomena;
2. Familiarity with museum collecting practices and standards;
3. Dealing with current research in the fields of the history of knowledge, collections, and science;
4. Familiarity with interdisciplinary approaches to the history of collecting.