Doing History in Public

Tag: museums

  • Reorienting the Home Front: Spatial History and Collective Memory

    Reorienting the Home Front: Spatial History and Collective Memory

    By Clemency Hinton (@clemencyhinton) Does the past sometimes feel ‘far away’? Can we ever ‘go back’? And ‘where’ did we come from?  These questions demonstrate that we often conceptualise and speak about history in spatial terms. That is, we describe the past as a place. History has famously been called a ‘foreign country’. Perhaps the…

  • Translation and Digital Democracy in the Feminist Archive South

    Translation and Digital Democracy in the Feminist Archive South

    By Elissa O’Connell (@ElissaOConnell) As readers will surely be aware, 2018 has been a historically significant year for women’s history and archives. The centenary of some women gaining the vote has created many opportunities to celebrate women-led activism across the UK, as well as to reinforce the need to document and protect these herstories through…

  • Critiquing cultural spaces: an interview with Alice Procter of the Uncomfortable Art Tours

    Critiquing cultural spaces: an interview with Alice Procter of the Uncomfortable Art Tours

    By Alice Procter (@aaprocter) and  Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) Alice Procter is a historian of material culture based at UCL. She has six years of tour guiding experience at heritage sites and galleries and runs Uncomfortable Art Tours, podcasts and writes under the umbrella of The Exhibitionist. I had the chance to interview you her about her work…

  • Uncomfortable History: Modern Skull Collecting

    Uncomfortable History: Modern Skull Collecting

    By Jeremiah J. Garsha (@jjgarsha) It is comforting to think of the collecting of human heads as existing in the distant past. When visitors to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford marvel at the shrunken heads display, they do so under a combination of alterity and distancing. The process of shrinking the heads renders them distinguishable…