Graduate Assistantships at the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa

2000

International Journal of …, 2007

Antioch Review, 2016

University Museums and Collections Journal, 2024

The full life cycle of undergraduate and postgraduate museum studies programs, from proposal, inception, growth, and change, through to cancellation over a ten year period at Macquarie University are discussed. This focuses on aspects of the program that made them successful with students, if not the institution, through a combination of analysis and personal reflection.

2016

A companion to museum studies, 2006

Curator: The Museum Journal, 1996

Despite the sometimes overwhelming public response to American museums in recent decades, the suspicion persists among museum people that museums are underutilized and poorly understood by the public at large. There is more than anecdotal evidence to support this feeling. Recent studies have indicated, for example, that despite an aggregate increase in museum attendance figures over time, the proportion of the public who might be considered regular or frequent museum goers has remained constant. Occasional visitors present a markedly different profile from the museum’s core clientele. In terms of the attributes they seek in leisure activities, they are not, as museum people have tended to assume, prospective candidates for conversion to the ranks to the frequent visitors. Rather, they more closely resemble non-visitors who come only often enough to be reminded that they don’t really like museums, which represent an unfamiliar cultural system. For them, museums are alien environments; the “museum code” is a foreign tongue. There is considerable irony in this. The idea that there was a need to instill visual and scientific literacy in the American public was perhaps the primary impetus animating the museum movement of the post-Civil War period, that great epoch of institution building. On the other hand, as Adele Silver noted, those who run American museums have never fully agreed on what museums should teach, to whom, or for what ends, but from the outset museums have undertaken to teach someone something.