European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen
Welcome to the homepage of EuNaMus, a three-year research project dedicated to the histories, actualizations and futures for European national museums. National museums collect, preserve and display nations' most cherished objects to tell about nations' senses of themselves. Today, they are contested institutions, often squeezed between conflicting demands. To produce vital knowledge for researchers, citizens, museum professionals and policy makers, this project integrates historical studies with a wider contextual examination of the role of museums in nations beyond Europe.
Read more about the project in EuNaMus' folder or on the blog Unfolding Eunamus
Listen to Professor Dominique Poulot on "France Culture" in a radio discussion on changing patterns for national museums in Europe: La fin du musée à l'occidentale?
Professor Simon Knell gives a keynote speech at the international conference Museum 2011 in Tapei, Taiwan 16-18 November. Read his abstract here He will also give a talk at the NHB academy in Singapore.
NEWS
Invitation to panel on the creation of new history museums and policy brief from EuNaMus. Brussels 25 January 2012. Read more here
Open Access Report: Building national museums in Europe 1750-2010
The aim of the EuNaMus research programme is to illuminate gaps in existing research by adding a crucial comparative perspective to the study of national museums. We are hereby presenting the first in a series of EuNaMus Open Access reports: the first comprehensive overview over national museums in Europe including an outline of the basis of comparative elements and significant variables.
In a comparative light and as a rule, the trajectories of the European national museums provide an account of the parallel interactions between museum, nation and state and give witness to the long standing relevance of national museums as constituent components of what is analysed as negotiated cultural constitutions.
Read the report in its entirety here
Call for papers: National museums and the negotiation of
difficult pasts
26-27 January 2012
Université Libre de Bruxelles
This conference aims to take a transnational and comparative perspective on the conflicts that national museums have dealt with as holders of contested objects and as places where disputed or difficult pasts are displayed.
Organised by Eunamus and Pr. Dominique Poulot, Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Deadline for proposals 14 November. Read more here
Image: The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum Photograph © Andrew Dunn
EDITED COLLECTION
National Museums: New Studies from Around the World
Edited by Simon Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Amundsen
This book is the outcome of Eunamus and the NaMu program's six international workshops.
From the publishers presentation:
"National Museums is the first book to explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting national contexts. Composed of new studies of countries that rarely make a showing in the English-language studies of museums, this book reveals how these national museums have been used to create a sense of national self, place the nation in the arts, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, ethnicity and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent decades.
National Museums combines research from both leading and new researchers in the fields of history, museum studies, cultural studies, sociology, history of art, media studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology. It is an interrogation of the origins, purpose, organisation, politics, narratives and philosophies of national museums."
