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.
About the Author: Simon Knell is Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.
Peter Aronsson is Professor in Cultural Heritage and the Uses of History at a multi-disciplinary Culture Studies Department at Linköping University.
Arne Bugge Amundsen is an award-winning Professor of Cultural History and Head of the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo.
Amy Jane Barnes is completing research in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.
Stuart Burch is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University where he teaches museum studies, heritage management and public history.
Jennifer Carter is Assistant Professor of Museum Studies in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.
Viviane Gosselin is a researcher affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness at the University of British Columbia.
Sally Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Publishing at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes.
Alan Kirwan is undertaking research at the University of Leicester.
