We are pleased to share videos of our recent conversations!
Museums, Religion, and the Work of Reconciliation and Remembrance on 9 May 2019, Jewish Museum Berlin. View video.
In their collections and their buildings, museums often carry traces of religion, past and present, which they curate and narrate for diverse audiences. Increasingly, museums are called on to represent and acknowledge the politics embedded in these collections, whether by repatriating spiritually-charged objects acquired through colonial networks or by telling more complex stories of national histories of racism, antisemitism, and violence.This public panel featured presentations by two museum curators who have long reflected on these issues: Jisgang Nika Collison (Haida Gwaii Museum, Haida Nation & Canada) and Léontine Meijer-van Mensch (State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony, Germany). Chair: Sharon Macdonald (CARMAH, Humboldt-University Berlin).
Schloss Conversations — Venus in Transit: Prehistoric Art and Religion on 28 January 2019. View video.
A conversation with Silvia Tomásková (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Nicolas Conard (University of Tübingen) hosted by Pamela Klassen (University of Toronto) and Monique Scheer (University of Tübingen). Tübingen houses some of the oldest works of art ever discovered; archeologists also hypothesize that they had religious functions. This installment of the ‘Schloss Conversations’ brings together perspectives from religious studies, cultural history, and archeology to think about the social and political contexts of the narratives that emerge around such artifacts and how they might be fueled by the apparatus provided by the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site.
Schloss Conversations — Reformation and Refugees: Alternative Histories, 14 November 2017. View video.
A conversation with Nicholas Terpstra (University of Toronto) and Peter van der Veer (MPI Göttingen) hosted by Pamela Klassen (University of Toronto) and Monique Scheer (Ludwig-Uhland-Institut, University of Tübingen). Both the 500-year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees have sparked intense reflection upon religion and public memory in Germany this year. This first in a series of ‘Schloss Conversations’ will take up these issues from historical and anthropological perspectives.