The Thing about Museums

Sandra Dudley is Senior Lecturer in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Recent books include Materialising Exile: material culture and embodied experience among Karenni refugees in Thailand (Berghahn 2010) and Museum Materialities (ed., Routledge 2010). Amy Jane Barnes has recently completed doctoral research on the collection, interpretation and display of visual culture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in contemporary British museums (University of Leicester 2009). Jennifer Binnie is currently a PhD student at University of Leicester, looking at the impact which art within museums and galleries may have upon wellbeing. Julia Petrov is a PhD student at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Her project traces the development of dress exhibitions in museums in England and North America over the twentieth century. Jennifer Walklate is a PhD student in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Her AHRC funded research explores and compares the production of temporal experiences in museums and works of literature.

List of illustrations List of contributors 1. Introduction: museums and things Part I: Objects and their creation in the museum Part II Visitors’ engagements with museum objects Part III The uses of objects in museum representations Part IV Objects and difficult subjects Afterword: A conversation with Sue Pearce