CFP 08.02.2016

Session at MoH (Baltimore, 5-7 Oct 16)

The Making of the Humanities Conference, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 05.–07.10.2016
Eingabeschluss : 01.04.2016

Elizabeth Rodini and Jennifer Kingsley, The Johns Hopkins University

Museums in the Making of the Humanities

Panel proposed for The Making of the Humanities Conference
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, Oct. 5-7, 2016

Central to modernity, museums, both as concept and practice, created new institutional pressures on intellectual inquiry over the course of the nineteenth century. They reshaped disciplines that traced their origins to the academies of ancient Greece and the universities of medieval Europe, and engendered new fields such as art history, archaeology, and anthropology.

Museums further instantiated and thereby solidified what became central disciplinary concepts—whether Alexander Lenoir's scheme of periodization in the Museum of French Monuments or Franz Boas' culture-centered approach to anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. Cast aside over the course of the 20th century as collections no longer served disciplinary needs, their importance is now being reevaluated in some fields. Concurrently, the museum itself has emerged as a subject of lively scholarly inquiry, though one rarely formalized in the academy (and on occasion confused with vocational training).

By assessing this trajectory in varied disciplines and civilizations, this panel offers new insights into the formation of and connections between the academic disciplines—not only in the humanities, but also between the humanities and the natural and social sciences. It considers the dialogue between spaces of practice and humanistic inquiry, and illuminates the changing relationship between universities and the public, including the so-called public humanities, at a moment when the value of humanistic inquiry is under intense scrutiny.

It is thus timely to introduce this topic into the "Making of the Humanities" project, and we invite papers on the following topics:

- Overviews or case studies that reveal how a critical study of museums illuminates the evolution of humanistic disciplines—their centers and peripheries, their methods and goals, including the more recent emergence of museology as an academic discipline in search of definition.
- Why and how the study of museums has lately been entering humanistic discourse: what does this tendency reveal about the evolution and present concerns of the humanities more generally?
- Comparative approaches to the place of collections in academic disciplines across cultural traditions or historical moments, fields of study or intellectual spheres.
- History of the relationships between museum "thinking" and academic practice, past and present.
- Consideration of how a study of things, materials, materiality, or media fits into this larger trajectory.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to erodinijhu.edu by April 1, 2016. Notification of selection will be made by April 15, and of the panel's acceptance to the conference by July 1. Selected participants will be eligible for funding through Museums and Society.

More on the Society for the History of the Humanities can be found here: http://www.historyofhumanities.org/

Quellennachweis:
CFP: Session at MoH (Baltimore, 5-7 Oct 16). In: ArtHist.net, 08.02.2016. Letzter Zugriff 29.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/12138>.

^