The Museum is Open. Towards a Transnational History of Museums, 1750–1940

Abstract

The history of museums is making its transnational turn. Having swept across the humanities over the past decade, the methods of supranational and entangled history, as well as histoire croisée, came to frame a conference on the European museum at the Technische Universität in Berlin in 2012. The resulting volume, The Museum is Open, seeks to correct an older historiographical bias which has typically narrated the emergence of the museum through the prism of the nation-state. Widening the lens of analysis, all the essays in this stimulating volume engage in various ways with the lateral, transnational networks of personnel, technologies and ideas which underwrote the museum age, from the mid-eighteenth century (represented here in Stefanie Heraeus’s discussion of how Paris lighting design was adapted in Kassel) through to the eve of the Second World War. The collection thus offers a set of snapshots of modern museological practice across the longue durée, selected from across the continent and thematically arranged. Many of the contributors have published fuller studies of these contacts and crossings elsewhere but it is still fruitful to have their arguments collated in a single book.