Museum Curator

So look, I'm gonna talk today really mostly about what I do as a curator here at the National Museum. But I wanna try and draw some kind of generalities from that in terms of how there's a series of curatorial practices, if you like, tools and techniques and methods that I think could be of interest to your students and of interest to you in developing extension history courses. I wanna talk about, so what I do as a curator, and then from that also talk a little bit about the kinds of history that I think museums are particularly good at creating and communicating. I think this is something I'd really like to discuss, because I think it's not necessarily very well understood that museums, as Dave insisted by putting up my quote at the beginning of the, in his slide, is that I think museums create a very particular kind of history. It's not the kind of history that gets created in books or indeed in films or in, I don't know, compositions. It's a very particular kind of history that grows out of the fact that museums are centrally interested and defined by their collections. I should say that's not an uncontested view of museums, but it's certainly my view of museums. So curators try to understand material culture as evidence of other people's lives as a means to try to understand other people, what they looked like, what they did, how they made a living, what they hoped for in their lives, how they tried to construct their world, and why they made particular choices. And one way in which curators differ from other historians is therefore in focus in terms of how we interrogate the past, what elements we use to communicate the past. Most academic historians are trained very much in discipline of words, and they concentrate on words. Still today, I think, although it's changing a little bit. If you go through university history, I think primarily you are encouraged to draw on things like archival accounts, manuscripts, now oral histories. And most of that work is actually promulgated in the form of books. There's also other kinds of historians. Obviously, filmmakers and photographers concentrate on creating images of the world and arranging them in meaningful sequences. But curators attend to objects. We look at objects as evidence of the past and try to arrange objects in meaningful ways called exhibitions.