The shifting audience of the university museum

Abstract

Faced with uncertainties of funding and the need to rely on increasing support from without the academic community, university museums in the United States are at risk of compromising their traditional mission of investigation, inquiry and challenge, according to Glenn Willumson. Yet the need for them to reassert their intellectual vigour and remain in the forefront of interdisciplinary dialogue has never been greater. The author holds a Ph.D. in art history and is currently curator of the Palmer Museum of Art, on Pennsylvania State University campus. He previously taught at the University of California and has served as a specialist in photography and American art at the Getty Research Institute. He has published extensively in American art and in the history of photography and is working on a book and exhibition project that considers the representation of the Western landscape and the first American transcontinental railroad. The recipient of numerous research awards, he has served on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press, the governing board of the Society for Photographic Education, and is a former advisor to History of Photography magazine.