HISTSCI 213V: Collecting the World: Objects, Museums, and Knowledge in Global Perspective

Th 4:00 – 5:59

TBA

This graduate colloquium explores a vital cluster of themes in contemporary critical inquiry: the relation between objects, knowledge, culture and society. Our approach will be both historical and theoretical. One aim is to bridge the divide between the literatures of history of science, history of art, anthropology and museum studies and read them together. Another is to move beyond Euro-American geographies to think about changing constructions of the universal and the global. Considering objects’ movement, and the mechanics of thieir mobility, will therefore be essential. So too will be the relation between collecting things and collecting people: making orders of objects and orders of society. We will examine various recent approaches to thing theory that consider the co-agency of nonhuman and human actors. Students will be encouraged to work on papers that use objects from local collections; and collection visits may form part of our term’s work. Specific topics may include: collecting traditions in the ancient world as well as modern antiquarianism and archaeology; collections of human bodily remains from reliquaries to anatomical collections and areas such as scientific racism; cabinets of curiosity and wonder-cabinets in both early modern science and their return in surrealist art and politics; universal and encyclopedic collecting in the eighteenth century and their legacy of public ‘global’ museums; Victorian-era imperial collecting, the development of anthropology and both postcolonial museology and restitution debates; non-western ontologies and collections from Asia to the Americas; the gender and sexuality of things; and the bifurcation of museology into specialist domains of art, science and culture after the nineteenth century in dialogue with the development of industrial capitalism and global markets.