Cold War Museology

Jessica Douthwaite is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Stirling working on the AHRC-funded collaboration with National Museums Scotland, Materialising the Cold War. Her Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD based at IWM London and University of Strathclyde was titled “Voices of the Cold War in Britain, 1945-1962” and awarded in 2018. She is currently writing a monograph which explores how the national and international landscapes of post-war Britain contextualised and influenced civilian experiences of Cold War security. She specialises in museum studies, ethnographic and interview methodology, and gender and international histories. Holger Nehring is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Stirling. He has published widely on the history of social movements in a transnational and global context as well as on the conceptual history of the Cold War. Together with Sam Alberti, he is the Co-I for the AHRC-funded project 'Materialising the Cold War'. Samuel J.M.M. Alberti is Director of Collections at National Museums Scotland, and an Honorary Professor in Heritage Studies at the University of Stirling. After training in history of science and teaching museology he worked at the intersection of museums and universities, first at the Manchester Museum, then as Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (including the Hunterian Museum). With Holger Nehring he led the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Materialising the Cold War’.

1. Making and unmaking the Cold War in museums; Section One: Networks of materiality; 2. Readiness for Red Alert: Engaging with the Material Culture of the Royal Observer Corps; 3. Anchoring museum objects in the Cold War: The hidden meanings of a Transatlantic telephone cable; 4. Beyond Janus-faced narratives: object lessons from the travelling-wave maser; 5. The Vulcan’s voice: Multiple meanings of a Cold War artefact; Section Two: Spaces, places and things; 6. Cold War through the looking glass: Espionage objects, authenticity and multiperspectivity; 7. Bunkers Revisited: Co-producing Memory, Meaning and Materiality in Danish Cold War Museums; 8. Creating a new Cold War museum: Curatorial reflections; 9. A War That Never Was: Locating, collecting, and exhibiting the experiences of British forces in Cold War West Germany; 10. There can’t be any Berlin Wall left: oral history, ‘domestic museums’ and the search for a British Cold War; 11. Looking out from Point Alpha: Entangled histories in a Cold War borderland; Section Three: Values and representations; 12. Cold War time: Contemporary military heritage in Sweden; 13. How the U-2 became a museum object – local identities and museum collections at the Norwegian Aviation Museum in Bodø; 14. Competing for authenticity, nostalgia, and visitor revenue in Cold War Museum; 15. What Colour was the Cold War?