The planned conference will revisit and reassess the emergence of national museums in the nineteenth century, seeking to uncover why distinct types of national museums came into being in different countries and identify the educational missions these institutions assumed. National museums exhibited a diverse range of remits and educational designs and their collections revolved around various different foci. We can identify two specific types of national museum in this period, with a degree of overlap in evidence. The first type is the group of museums whose collections pursued the aim of communicating a comprehensive body of knowledge as well as public aesthetic education. Many of these museums were art-focused museums such as galleries or collections of sculptures or ancient artefacts. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, a second group emerged alongside these primarily educational museums: establishments whose purpose was to raise public awareness of their nation’s essence. These institutions included, for example, museums of history or of the history of the nation’s culture, military museums, and specific collections centring on the nation’s history, culture, natural history etc. The regional Landesmuseen of the German states, whose exhibitions sought to showcase a particular regional territory rather than the nation, are instances of this type.

The purpose of this conference will be to take a comparative look at these two types of museum and their divergent educational remits, examining their shared features and their differences. We will attend specifically to the ways in which such museums presented the content they intended to communicate. Aspects of interest in this regard include the foci of the museums’ collections, the arrangement and presentation of exhibits, and underlying ideas and conceptions – be they, for instance, chronological, typological or suggestive of a particular atmosphere or setting – alongside the educational intent from which they emerged. Collections that were arranged chronologically, for example, often sought to present the nation or the present time as the apogee of a process of cultural progression. Typological collections, meanwhile, might implicitly contrast artefacts from the nation’s own culture with those from another, placing the former in a positive comparative light; instances of this practice include displaying works of art grouped in national styles or schools, or presenting exhibits along quality criteria with reference to a remit of aesthetic education. The use of explanatory imagery in exhibition spaces and the arrangement of artefacts in so-called ‘period rooms’ with the intent of creating an authentic impression of their original use are likewise of interest to the conference as strategies of presentation. The ways in which museums paid note to their originary collectors, benefactors and founders are also of high relevance.

We would like to invite proposals for papers of between 20 and 30 minutes’ duration that compare and contrast educational conceptions and strategies in the various museums founded in the course of the nineteenth century. We welcome comparisons of institutions from the two groups outlined above on an intra- or inter-group basis, within or among nations and states. Papers discussing one museum only should focus specifically on the educational strategies used and the underlying conceptions they reveal; we are unable to consider submissions consisting exclusively in a chronological, non-analytical account of the construction or foundation of one museum only. The nineteenth century is our focal period, but submissions may refer back or forward in time from this point. Our geographical area of interest is the territory of present-day Europe.