News

A review of the exhibition "Indigenous Motivations: Recent Acquisitions from the National Museum of the American Indian," written collaboratively by students in Haidy Geismar's spring 2007 class "Topics in Museums Studies: Anthropology in and of Museums" (G49.3330), was published October 3, 2007 in the online edition of Museum Anthropology Review.

New Faculty

Miriam Basilio joins the Art History Department and the Program in Museum Studies as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2007. Dr. Basilio received a B.A. in Political Science from Boston College (1989), an M.A. in Liberal Studies and a Certificate in Museum Studies from New York University (1991), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1995, 2002). Her research interests include modern art in Spain and Latin America; the cultural authority of the museum as a force that contributes to national self-definition, and as a canon-forming institution. Dr. Basilio was Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture (2001-2002) and in the Department of Drawings (2002-2005) at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-curated Tempo and MoMa at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. She has contributed to exhibition catalogues and published articles on art and propaganda during the Spanish Civil War. She has been the recipient of grants from Fulbright, Program of Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of Culture and US Universities and Fundacion Carolina.

Jennifer Stampe joins the Program in Museum Studies as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the fall of 2007. She earned her B.A. in Religion and Culture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1991), a Master of Liberal Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (1997) and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2007). Previously, she has taught at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include cultural politics; social theory; museums, tourism, and heritage; and state, civil society, and public spheres. Her dissertation is a consideration of the perils and possibilities of cultural representation pursued in the context of struggles over tribal self-determination, based on ethnographic fieldwork at an Ojibwe museum in Minnesota. There, dilemmas of representation illuminate problems in constituting new forms of subjectivity and new criteria of political belonging. She is preparing articles on conducting ethnographic research in tourist settings and on changing Ojibwe self-representations.

Jeffrey Trask joins the Program in Museum Studies as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the fall of 2007. He received his B.Sc. in Design from Radford University (1991), his M.A. in Museum Studies from Fashion Institute of Technology (1998), and his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University (2006). Previously, he has taught at Barnard College and CUNY. Dr. Trask's research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Century United States, museum history, material culture and collecting, public history, and gender and urban-landscape studies. He is currently revising a manuscript for publication, American Things: The Search for an Aesthetic Usable Past. Recent awards Dr. Trask has been offered include the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellowship from the New-York Historical Society (2007-2008), the Daniel Lyons Postdoctoral Visiting Assistant Professorship from Brooklyn College (2007), and a Winterthur Museum Research Fellowship (2004).

Haidy Geismar joins the Anthropology Department and the Program in Museum Studies as Assistant Professor in the fall of 2006. She received her B.A. in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (1997) and both her M.A. in the Anthropology of Art and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from University College London (1999, 2003). Dr. Geismar's research interests are focused on material and visual culture, cross-cultural theories of materiality and value, the anthropology of intellectual and cultural property, and the Pacific (Vanuatu and New Zealand). She has published articles on the auction market for Pacific arts, indigenous intellectual property legislation, contemporary indigenous arts, and on the entangled history of anthropology and photography. Recent awards include a British Academy Small Research Grant (2004), a NZ-UK Link Foundation Social Science Research Fellowship (2004), and an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (2003).

Faculty Research
Dr. Bruce Altshuler traveled to Eastern Europe and Russia in June 2002, and to South East Asia and China in October 2002, to study the needs of local museums and museum professional. Supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Asian Cultural Council, this research is directed toward establishing a summer institute for museum professionals from developing nations.

Glenn Wharton is currently working with MoMA to develop a preservation for their new media collections and the Dia Art Foundation to conduct a General Conservation Survey of the Dia:Beacon museum. In addition, he is working on a book that investigates the potential for conservation as a tool for excavating public memory and stimulating critical thinking about the past. He performed an ethnography and a "participatory" conservation project in North Kohala, Hawaii, in which local residents engaged in conservation research, decision making and intervention. Through dialogue and community activities, new relationships with the material past were forged while negotiating its representation through a monument in Kamehameha I.

Page updated: 17 July 2007