The history of museums has gained wide attention. Museums are perfect showcases of the manifold ways in which people approach their own particular present or past as well as the natural world by putting it on display. Especially when it comes to exploring the making of the nineteenth-century global world, museums have been studied as being crucial parts of Western centers of calculation. However, the landscape of nineteenth-century museums and collections is certainly much wider, more nuanced and complex than the current historiography, centered on the metropolitan collections assembled by northern Europe’s colonial powers, has suggested. Museums and collections generated and channeled a flow of data, natural specimens and artifacts that through their relationship with people, travelled to diverse places, and in a variety of directions. This has often been overlooked, so that many important movements remain almost invisible up to now. Against this background, the workshop organizers suggest a change of perspective, proposing to explore those many collections that came to less central cities and institutions which up to now have largely remained out of historians’ purview. We aim at furthering our understanding of the diverse ways in which these collections connected places and people in most unexpected ways and generated new sociabilities. This workshop thus focuses on museums and collections in the so-called peripheries: the colonial and post-colonial territories, and the European provinces. It will focus on natural history collections and will highlight how artifacts, plants and substances, through their relationship with people, travelled and connected the world from the nineteenth up to the beginning of the twentieth century, creating networks that were not necessarily centralized around either the European metropolises or the respective national museums. We deem it worthwhile, to study museums, as well as these collections and the sociabilities that go with them beyond the metropolis.
The workshop will take the example of Gotha, its collections and museums, as a case study and departure point (Eberle 2014). It will explore the flow of data as well as the movements of humans and things, it will problematize the traditional center/periphery bias of museum studies and juxtapose alternative approaches also in order to introduce previously understudied global narratives in order to shape future research agendas.

The workshop will be sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Contact & Registration: forschungszentrum.gotha@uni-erfurt.de