Museums and Biographies—Stories, Objects, Identities

The latest entry in this excellent series from the International Centre For Cultural & Heritage Studies at Newcastle University, this collection of essays about museums is edited by Kate Hill (history, U. of Lincoln, UK). Its central theme is the idea of museums as tellers of stories. Therefore, the essays investigate the connection between museums and biographies. In her introduction, Hill identifies three basic types of biographies: of people, of things, and of relationships. The book's first section looks at relationships between individual people's biographies and the histories of museums they're associated with. The second looks at hidden or questioned biographies: women of influence in museums, and an interesting anonymized study of curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The third sections look at institutional biographies: the stories of museum buildings. The fourth looks at biographies of objects: a set of Buddhist bronzes, a set of racial type portrait sculptures, the history of a red feather cape. The fifth looks at museums which function biographically: houses of famous writers, Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments. And the final section looks at autobiography: autobiographical museums, how individual autobiographies are used to tell history in museums, and biographies that communities create of themselves for museum display. The book ends with a reflective essay in a postmodernist tradition. Its style is different from the scholarly but accessible tone of the rest of the book, where the writing style of academic history is leavened by direct conversation with the reader, photographs, and, of course, a focus on telling stories. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)