European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen
Welcome to the homepage of Eunamus, a three-year research project funded under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission. The project is dedicated to the histories, actualizations and futures for European national museums. National museums collect, preserve and display nations' most cherished objects to tell about nations' senses of themselves. Today, they are contested institutions, often squeezed between conflicting demands. To produce vital knowledge for researchers, citizens, museum professionals and policy makers, this project integrates historical studies with a wider contextual examination of the role of museums in nations beyond Europe.
Read more about the project in Eunamus' folder or on the blog Unfolding Eunamus.
What was last week's conference on material identities about? Listen to a news item on Eunamus in Athens 98,4 FM, radio station of the Municipality of Athens, Greece, 24 April 2012: 02 AudioTrack 02 1.mp3
NEWS
Open conference
Museum Policies in Europe between 1990 and 2010: Negotiating Political and Professional Utopia
Oslo 27-29 June 2012
In a Europe realizing the impact of globalization and human mass migration, the role of the national museums is put to debate. Studies from five different countries on how nations (and EU) develop policy in order to deploy national museums in redefinition of the nation state will be presented at this conference, establishing an arena in which museologists and cultural politicians get the chance to meet and debate a matter deeply important to everybody concerned with cultural identity uses.
Click here for more information and here for the conference flyer
Crossing Borders: Connecting European Identities in Museums and Online
Eunamus second open access report is now online. This report presents key findings of research undertaken by the EuNaMus consortium in its attempts to understand the ‘museology of Europe’. This notion is used here to describe activities which are peculiar to museums and which result from the manner in which museums assemble and deploy objects. This research investigated the ways in which captial cities, national art museums, online museum-like spaces, and national, regional and local museums produce opportunities for connecting identities. Click here to read
Open lectures in Athens 25 April 2012
Click here to read programme in English or here for a version in Greek
Workshops in Athens 23 - 27 April 2012
Museums as agents for change
The consortium’s preliminary findings support the notion that European policymakers should be doing more to recognize national museums as agents of social change. Click here to read policy implications of EUNAMUS comparision of the development of museums in 37 European countries.
Click here to read an article on Eunamus in Socio-economic and Humanities Research for Policy – a monthly news service providing a platform for dissemination of research findings from EU projects funded through the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes. The news service is designed to reach policy makers and the media.
EUNAMUS FINAL CONFERENCE
National Museums in a Changing Europe
Budapest 12-14 December 2012
Call for papers will be published soon.
EUNAMUS IN THE MEDIA
Interview with Eunamus coordinator Peter Aronsson in Pan European Networks: Government 01
Museums and national identity on Swedish radio
Press summary on museums and national identitities in English
Eunamus Report No 1
Building national museums in Europe 1750-2010
The aim of the EuNaMus research programme is to illuminate gaps in existing research by adding a crucial comparative perspective to the study of national museums. We are hereby presenting the first in a series of EuNaMus Open Access reports: the first comprehensive overview over national museums in Europe including an outline of the basis of comparative elements and significant variables.
In a comparative light and as a rule, the trajectories of the European national museums provide an account of the parallel interactions between museum, nation and state and give witness to the long standing relevance of national museums as constituent components of what is analysed as negotiated cultural constitutions.
Read the report in its entirety here
EDITED COLLECTION
National Museums: New Studies from Around the World
Edited by Simon Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Amundsen
This book is the outcome of Eunamus and the NaMu program's six international workshops.
From the publishers presentation:
"National Museums is the first book to explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting national contexts. Composed of new studies of countries that rarely make a showing in the English-language studies of museums, this book reveals how these national museums have been used to create a sense of national self, place the nation in the arts, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, ethnicity and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent decades.
National Museums combines research from both leading and new researchers in the fields of history, museum studies, cultural studies, sociology, history of art, media studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology. It is an interrogation of the origins, purpose, organisation, politics, narratives and philosophies of national museums."
