Reading Group

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) has funded a faculty reading group on the topic of "museums writ large," now in its third year. This reading group considers museums as sites where identities are asserted/contested/negotiated within a dynamic social, political, national, and/or religious context. It examines the social, historical, and economic conditions that generated the collections housed in museums as well as the architectural frameworks and anthropological and art historical practices deployed for the collection and display of objects and "Others." Reading group members come from a wide range of departments and units (Anthropology, Art History, Education, History, Landscape Architecture, Library & Information Science, Krannert Art Museum, Spurlock Museum, International Programs and Studies). In addition to monthly critical discussions of selected readings, each year the reading group has sponsored the visit of a major museum scholar: Daniel Sherman ("Jean Dubuffet and the Problem of Categorizing and Displaying Outsider Art"), Christopher Steiner ("The Nut Museum: On the Social Construction of Oddity in American Culture"), and Ruth Phillips (" Re-presenting Native North America at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the National Museum of the American Indian").