ARTH 255Museum Studies

Catalog

This course will explore recent museum innovation-addressing museums of art, natural history, science and technology, history, and ethnographic museums-informed by an understanding of the historical emergence and elaboration of the public museum form through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the robust critical discourse on museums that gained momentum toward the end of the twentieth century. We will examine contemporary expectations that museums should function variously as popular public social institutions, as technologies of cultural identification, as repositories of civic values, and as engines of urban revitalization, while being largely dependent, in the US, on private and corporate philanthropy. This course fulfills the "Post-1800" distribution requirement for the Art History major.