Museum Studies at Leicester

Events archive

2024/25 School of Museum Studies/Institute for Digital Culture Seminars (Semester 1)

Land Marks

2 May – 28 November 2024

This exhibition, organised by MA Art Museum and Gallery students, explores our relationship to the natural environment through a curated collection of landscape art from the 1960s to today.

It features the work of contemporary artist Kate Genever, whose practice is rooted in ideas of community, place and environment.

Over five thematic sections: Co-existence, Fragility, Memory, Reclamation and Conflict, the exhibition asks us to consider how we have shaped the landscape, and in return how the landscape leaves its mark on us.  

Website Image

Eulogy to those who lost their life at sea, Kate Genever, pencil on paper, 2019. 

Including works by: Peter Berrisford, Peter Blake, Boyd and Evans, Reg Cartwright, Jenny Cook, Matthew Cook, P J Crook, Heather Deedman, Arabella Dorman, Terry Frost, Kate Genever, Andrew Scott George, Rigby Graham, Fay Godwin, Claire Halifax, Paul Hill, Albert Houtheuesen, Anita Klein, Ian McDonald, William McQuitty, Paul Nash, Margaret Norton, Alan Reynolds, Bridget Riley, Peter Sumpter, Ken Symonds, Laetitia Yhap.

Works lent by Leicester County Council Collection through Creative Learning Services and by Kate Genever.

Find out more about Kate Genever’s work. 

Land Marks - Panel Discussion

9 May 2024, 5.30pm - 6.30pm (doors open at 5.00pm), Museum Studies Building

Following the land marks exhibition, AMAGS will be bringing together three guests from the disciplines of art and geography (Kate Genever, Professor Martin Phillips and Dr Rosemary Shirley) for a free panel discussion to share their practice and research. 

This discussion will be framed by the themes of vulnerability and possibility, from which the panellists will consider and explore questions on the human impact of landscape both negatively and positively.

Admission to the event is free, with walk-ins welcome and free refreshments.

2023/24 School of Museum Studies Seminars

School of Museum Studies Wednesday Seminars: past events

Future Landscapes

28 May – 21 October 2022, School of Museum Studies Building

This exhibition places the work of artist Rebecca Chesney in dialogue with a selection of pieces from the Arts Council Collection.

Chesney’s practice explores and challenges traditional depictions of landscape, often revealing the social, political and environmental issues at the heart of our relationships with nature.

The pieces from the Arts Council Collection represent a wide range of approaches to landscape and the environment in art from the 1950s to today.

Together, the works in this exhibition generate new conversations about how we romanticise, manage, define, and live in landscapes. Ultimately, it asks the important question: What is the future for our landscapes?

Featuring the work of: Roger Ackling, John Blakemore, Boyd and Evans, Patrick Caulfield, Bob Chaplin, Rebecca Chesney, Joshua Compston, Guy Heatherington, Mariele Neudecker Eduardo Paolozzi, Victor Passmore, Ray Smith, Susan Tragmar.

Future Landscapes is organised by Art Museum and Gallery Studies (AMAGS) MA students It is part of the AMAGS MA Programme in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

Find out more about Chesney on Rebecca Chesney's website. 

School of Museum Studies offer holder webinar

Join our School of Museum Studies offer holder webinar on Monday 31 July from 2.00pm - 3.00pm (BST).

You’ll hear more about our campus based courses, our research-inspired teaching from our Programme Directors and have the chance to ask your questions.  

Exhibition: 'The Activist Museum'

Wednesday 10 November 2021 3.00pm - 4.30pm GMT
Online event

The Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester is delighted to invite you to ‘The Activist Museum’.

The event brings together projects which, although addressing hugely different injustices and crises, share a concern for democratic practice, opening up space for multiple voices and creating more equitable museums. The Museum of Transology, Journey to Justice and 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object partner up to share reflections on activist museum practice.

Anna Lucas, Clay Pensier, 2020, archival digital print

Anna Lucas, Clay Pensier, 2020, archival digital print

Alongsiding: Anna Lucas with the Arts Council Collection

23 June – 8 October 2021

School of Museum Studies Building

Alongsiding is an exhibition of artworks from the Arts Council Collection selected by artist Anna Lucas and exhibited alongside a selection of her work. Curated by Lucas and Art Museum and Gallery Studies (AMAGS) MA students, the exhibition is located in different spaces of the School of Museum Studies building. The idea of 'alongsiding' involves looking at images, looking at them again, and looking at images with others and together reflecting on the different things we see. More broadly, the concept of alongsiding is about opening oneself up to difference itself. 

Featuring work in film and photography by Brian Alterio, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Barry Flanagan, Peter Fraser, Raphael Hefti, Mikhail Karikis, Yve Lomax, Anna Lucas, Helen McQuillan, Martin Parr, Frances Scott, Lynn Silverman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Armando Andrade Tudela, Alice Walton.

Alongsiding is jointly curated by Art Museum and Gallery Studies (AMAGS) MA students (cohorts from 2019/20 and 2020/21) and Anna Lucas. It is part of the AMAGS MA Programme in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Lucas's moving image work is distributed by LUX, UK. 

North American alumni reunion 

AAM New Orleans LogoWe are delighted to announce that the School of Museum Studies is hosting its first North American alumni reunion at AAM in New Orleans! 

Monday 20 May, 4.00 - 5.30 PM, Marriott New Orleans (conference headquarters). 

All Leicester graduates welcome! Please save the date. 

Janet Marstine and Ross Parry will be your hosts and are looking forward to catching up with you. 

We also want to explore with you how we might support our North American graduates in developing a Museum Studies Connect - North American Group. 

Whose voices do we hear in the museum? 

Whose voice we hear in the museum matters. Museums are good at representing some voices, at showcasing and privileging these, they are good at presenting dominant mainstream narratives, and it is all too easy to hear these in the choice of what is collected, what is displayed, in how collections are presented and interpreted. 

But, what if we ask the question: whose voices are absent? Whose experiences remain untold? How can we hear neglected and unheard voices? How do we create opportunities for these to be heard? What possibilities do we give visitors not only to engage with these neglected voices, but to process their own experiences and also to be given a voice? 

Considering neglected and unheard voices offers museums different possibilities, alternative ways of working, enabling museums to be agents of progressive ways of thinking, empowering them to become more ambitious and impactful in nurturing more equitable and inclusive societies. 

To hear unheard voices demands radically different approaches, working in new ways that are ethically conscious, which challenge the inequalities in power that have tended to characterise many attempts by cultural institutions to engage people whose lives, perspectives and experiences have been previously neglected. The research project Stories of a different kind which culminated in a performance by Matt Fraser entitled Cabinet of Curiosities: how disability was kept in a box explored the use of The Trading Zone, a concept borrowed from the realm of science and technology. 

This offers a model which brings together people from different backgrounds, expertise, specialisms or lived experience to discuss an issue and collaborate. Through this process we hear many neglected voices, including the voice of Terry Wiles as an adult he reflects on his experiences as a very young child strapped into a gas-powered prosthetic brace. His voice, his experience, and the voice of the conventional museum label which privileges a medical, deficit model of disability, are a gulf apart. 

How much opportunity do we give visitors to reflect, to engage and to consider the implications of neglected voices? How often do we really hear visitors’ voices? Drawing on the visitor study of the National Trust programme Prejudice and Pride we challenge those who spoke the loudest, whose voices were most heard and listen to hear the quiet voice of the majority of visitors. How do they negotiate and process their experiences, how have they been prompted to think differently? 

Museums claim to be for everyone, but only by listening to everyone’s voices – especially neglected, quiet, and unheard voices, can they ever really meet this claim. 

This inaugural lecture draws on over 30 years’ experience of museum practice and Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG). 

Research seminars 

  • Wednesday 6 February, 1.00pm to 2.00pm: Guro Nordby, PhD Researcher (Universitetet i Sørøst-Norge, Norway)  - Materiality in industry - people, things and the industrial landscape
  • Wednesday 13 March, 1.00pm to 2.00pm: Assunta Ruocco, Artist (PhD Researcher at Loughborough University and Lecturer in Fine Art at De Monfort University, UK) - Co-working with things: how furnished spaces contribute to the emergence of artworks 
  • Wednesday 20 March, 5.00pm to 6.00pm: Weimin Lyu, PhD Researcher (Fudan University, Shanghai, China) - TBA 
  • Wednesday 3 April, 4.00pm to 5.00pm: Dr Corinne Fowler (University of Leicester) - Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted 
  • Wednesday 10 April, 4.00pm to 5.00pm: Alice Farren-Bradley, PhD Researcher (Independent Art Law Specialist and Due Diligence Research Consultant; PhD Researcher at Newcastle University, UK) - Curation as Due Diligence: Mitigating Risk in Museum Collections 
  • Wednesday 1 May, 4.00pm to 5.00pm: Alcina Cortez, PhD Researcher (Nova Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal) - Mobilizing the knowable on music in museum exhibitions through multimodality and sound epistemologies 
  • Wednesday 8 May, 4.00pm to 5.00pm: Dr Paula Serafini (University of Leicester) - Liberating the museum? Cultural Institutions as sites of protest 
  • Wednesday 15 May, 1.00pm to 2.00pm: Stefania Donini, PhD Researcher (The Barbican and the Guildhall School, London, UK) - The ‘participatory turn’ in arts institutions: audience engagement and its discontents 

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Politics, post-colonialism and the economic value of the museum as it appears in the projects of the Arab world

Charalampos (Harris) Chaitas

Executive Director, Culture, Arts and Education, Qiddia, Saudi Arabia, and former Director for Operations and Management, Grand Egyptian Museum

Wednesday 20 February 2019, 5.00pm to 6.30pm in Ken Edwards Lecture Theatre 2

In the 20 years since the inauguration of Guggenheim Bilbao, global museum interest has shifted from western countries to Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Within this context of a regional museum boom, the Louvre-Abu Dhabi, inaugurated on 8 November 2017, has created a new milestone in how a ‘universal museum’ defines itself.

The lecture will discuss recent museum development in the MENA countries within a complex political and socioeconomic context. It will analyse the current environment in the region and also explore the ambitious plans for 2030 that most of the MENA countries have announced. 

Museums and the Transgender Tipping Point

E-J Scott and Richard Sandell

Monday 4 February, 6.00pm to 7.30pm in the Museum Studies Lecture Hall, Museum Studies (19 University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RF)

Over the past decade there has been a growing number of museum exhibitions and displays featuring transgender lives, reflecting an increasing trans-visibility across many areas of public life. 

At the same time, progressive representations – told from the perspectives and through the voices of transgender people, as well as being shaped out of an understanding of the human rights issues affecting the community, past and present – remain highly unusual.

How might these progressive portrayals – that privilege trans lived experience over other forms of expertise – be understood in relation to broader efforts to secure the rights of transgender people? To what extent might museum narratives of gender diversity be harnessed to inform the ways in which visitors perceive, think and talk about transgender equality and, potentially, to have positive influence more broadly beyond the institution? 

How might progressive portrayals of transgender lives potentially act upon the coercive, restricting and oppressive gender norms, and widespread prejudice, that pervade the variety of contexts within which transgender people attempt to claim and exercise their rights?

Richard Sandell introduces this session, drawing on recent research to argue that progressive portrayals of transgender lived experience can be seen as a form of human rights work, carefully crafted and purposefully deployed with the specific aim to act upon the conditions which constrain equality and negatively impact the lives of transgender people. 

E-J Scott (dress historian and curator) discusses the Museum of Transology – the first major exhibition in the UK (if not the world) to explore trans lives using the material culture surrounding them; an iconic museum project that has attracted enormous public interest and evoked extraordinarily powerful responses amongst visitors. The project began by gathering everyday objects and stories from the local trans community in Brighton, and developed into a collection of over 250 objects chosen by 108 trans people to represent their gender journeys.

Heartfelt, brave and intimate, the deeply moving stories share themes of hope, despair, ambition, confidence and desire through objects of social history, dress, medicine, beauty products and personal ephemera, artists’ installations and portraiture. Brought together, these individual experiences provide a revelatory account of how gender politics has evolved in the UK, reflecting the increasing shift in social consciousness towards mainstream acceptance and legislative equality for the trans population.

This event for LGBT History Month is one of a series marking 20 years of the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries.

University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong

Monday 14 January 2019, 5.15pm - 6.15pm

1/F T.T. Tsui Building

90 Bonham Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
No registration required. All welcome.

Please join us for a free public lecture with Professor Jocelyn Dodd and Dr Sarah Plumb, University of Leicester, and a chance to find out more about our part time Museum Studies postgraduate degree run jointly with Leicester and Hong Kong University’s School of Professional and Continuing Education. The lecture will be followed by a networking event for alumni and museum professionals, 6.30pm - 8.00pm

Across the world populations are ageing, instead of celebrating this, the negative perception of ageing and older people abound. This limits opportunities for older people to continue to contribute to society or find meaning and purpose in later life. Unexpected Encounters makes the case for the role that museums can play in supporting older people to live well. Museums’ capacity to engage older people has only been partially realised, framed by the medical model of ageing that focuses on decline, illness and frailty. Much more can be done to engage older people, drawing on their experiences and listening to their voices, as well as using museums to challenge harmful negative stereotypes. 

Being Human: A festival of Humanities - The Fabric of Memory

Thursday 22 November, Attenborough Arts Centre, 3.00pm - 8.00pm

Bring along fabrics that remind you of someone or an event and enter into conversations with performers about how we remember as textiles are carefully ironed and folded. This participatory performance looks at the memories sparked by our clothes. 

The event is a free drop-in performance on 22 November from 3.00pm - 8.00pm at the Attenborough Arts Centre, where you are invited to bring along clothes, textiles and other fabrics. There will also be academic talks with researchers from the University of Leicester, artists and a textile conservator, exploring our relationships to textiles and memory. 

The academic talks are led by artist Nir Segal and Dr Nuala Morse, School of Museum Studies 

The event was selected to be part of Being Human by the festival organisers, the School of Advanced Study, University of London, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the British Academy (BA).

Museum Studies Research Seminar: Alexander Massouras: Lessons from Casts 

Wednesday 7 November, Collections Room, School of Museum Studies, 1.00pm - 2.00pm

This talk and photo-essay addresses the cast as a pedagogic form, inspired by the roles plaster casts once played in art education. Once an apparatus for disseminating a classical formal vocabulary, in the 20th century, plaster came to teach artists very different lessons. 

Alexander Massouras is an artist and critic who has held fellowships at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford and the Paul Mellon Centre, and was a member of the Tate Research Project Art School Educated. His work is in collections including the British Museum, V&A, Ashmolean Museum, New York Public Library, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and DESTE Foundation.

Chiara Marabelli is a second-year doctoral student at the School of Museum Studies. Focusing on cast collections, her research explores the concept of authenticity in art and museums and aims to foster sensory engagement in the museum context.

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