Project Summary

Curatorial Studies: Expanding the Impact of the Humanities through Interdisciplinary and Experiential Partnerships

Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college in central New York, proposed a two-and-a-half-year plan to develop an interdisciplinary Curatorial Studies program and a new minor. The initiative aims to foster connections across the humanities and other disciplines, and between the College and neighboring museums and archives.

From science to Indigenous peoples of the Americas and American living history, to fine and decorative arts, Hamilton’s location supports access to an array of regional museum collections, in addition to Hamilton’s own Special Collections and Wellin Museum of Art, all important strengths of a Curatorial Studies minor. The initiative explores the collection and interpretation of cultural artifacts, archival documents, artwork, scientific data, etc., and offers students opportunities to exhibit curatorial research as public scholarship through “mutually beneficial scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners” (Ciadella, 2018).

During the grant period, Hamilton faculty will work to establish regional partnerships and pilot an interdisciplinary Curatorial Studies program to make experiential learning a discernable yet integrated facet of Hamilton’s humanities curriculum. The program will include Hamilton’s arts and humanities faculty, trained professionals in the Wellin Museum and Burke Library’s Special Collections, and at our partner institutions: Munson Museum of Art in Utica, Fenimore Art Museum and the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, and Everson Art Museum and Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology, both in Syracuse. Each person in this collaboration will bring distinctive insights that are essential to the success of the NEH initiative.

Students in the Curatorial Studies program will learn how to critically conceptualize and assess an exhibition, analyzing its organizing assumptions and foci; they will speak with curators, collectors, educators, material specialists, and other experts for a behind-the-scenes look into the process of defining the idea of an exhibition, researching texts, documents, or objects of material culture, and launching an exhibition. Drawing from coursework and interactions with special collection, archive, or museum professional, students will learn about museum theory and the ethics of collection, curation, and exhibition. Then students will start to make their own curatorial decisions. They will formulate an exhibition concept, conduct research in collections or archives, interpret the content, and develop a public-facing exhibition (virtual or physical) that is both accessible to general audiences and edifying to specialists. Students will also learn to write object labels, exhibition texts, and catalog essays.

Working with physical objects can be profoundly different from working with digital artifacts in many inestimable ways. And yet many of the modes of curating – in the capacious sense that informs this entire initiative – physical and virtual materials pose remarkably similar challenges of conceptualizing a collection. Thus, we anticipate that many students will apply curatorial insights to the use of digital humanities technologies (e.g., VR, 3-D technology, and 360-degree videos) to ask questions beyond, as well as, those of traditional analyses. When working with objects and DH technologies, Curatorial Studies students might similarly ask how the selection and organization of the space, lighting, and arrangement of objects with respect to each other creates meaning in a VR exhibit. Hamilton faculty who currently incorporate digital technologies in their teaching explore subjects such as data collection, data visualization, and data ethics (including the intersection of digital technologies and race, gender, and privacy issues). Curatorial Studies students will engage with these very same issues as they curate and design an exhibition for a broad and diverse audience.

During the grant period, a faculty committee will work to create curricular structures to build upon and develop existing areas of expertise through connections with other faculty and museum curators. While many Museum Studies programs tend to be framed by the discipline of Art History and/or the historical and theoretical study of museum practice, Hamilton's Curatorial Studies program will be broadly multidisciplinary in ways that correspond to the areas of specialization of Hamilton’s faculty across disciplines, student interests, and the particular strengths of our institutional partners. The committee will also draw from resources provided in the NEH grant, such as funding for student research, internships, and TA fellowships as a way to introduce to students the broad range of career possibilities. The grant also provides funding for research fellowships and internships especially to encourage students from underrepresented populations to participate.

A collection in a museum, a library, or an archive is the product of intentional acts of acquisition as well as the cumulative effects of a discontinuous series of acquisitions over time. Making sense of such collections depends much on one’s perspective and disciplinary training. The interests that collections hold for the humanist, social scientist, or scientist surely differ. A humanist might be drawn to a collection for insights into how humans create meaning with objects within cultural contexts; a social scientist might track long-term socioeconomic patterns from a collection’s data; a scientist might seek knowledge about living organisms or the physical world. The extensive holdings of texts, documents, or objects in a collection can both accommodate and unexpectedly resist such uses. Students will learn to question the context and acquisition of collections, their importance to the region, and the communities from which they originated.