Section outline

  • Meeting Point: 

    Morning and Afternoon Sessions: The Imperial War Museum (nearest Tube: Elephant & Castle). In the morning, meet at the entrance to the “Witnesses to War” display on the first floor. When you enter the museum from the main front entrance, there is a bookshop to your right. Walk through the bookshop to the exit at the opposite end. Meet just outside the bookshop exit, near the sign for the “Witnesses to War” display.

    • Essential Reading (ALL ATTACHED BELOW): 

      • Susan A. Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum’, History and Theory 36:4 (1997): 44-63. 
        • QUESTION: What does Crane mean by the "distortions" caused by the ways museums represent history? And what does she propose museums do about it?
      • Gaynor Kavanagh, ‘Museum as Memorial: The origins of the Imperial War Museum’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 23, no. 1 (January 1988), 77–97. 
        • QUESTION: What purposes was the IWM designed to serve when it was founded? 

       

      Further Reading: 

      • Tim Benton, Understanding Heritage and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
      • Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Thomas Butler ed., Memory:  History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
      • Adrian Forty and Suzanne Kuchler (eds), The Art of Forgetting (Oxford: Berg, 1999).
      • Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH: University Press of Vermont, 1993).
      • Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations No. 26 (Spring, 1989), 7–24.
      • Lorena Rivera-Orraca, ‘Are Museums Sites of Memory?’, The New School Psychology Bulletin 6:2 (2009): 32–37. 
      • Richard Terdiman, Present Past:  Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1993).
      • Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
      • Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).


    • Crane - Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum URL

      Log in through your QMUL account for access.

    • Kavanagh - Museum as Memorial URL

      Log in through your QMUL account for access.