With a grant from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, I am spending the autumn semester 2012 working with the European Union National Museums Project (EUNAMUS), a three-year multi-nation multi-disciplinary research collaborative between eight university institutions dedicated to the histories and futures of European national museums. Funded through the European Commission, its focus is on a critical understanding of the conditions for using the past in negotiations that recreate citizenship. I am spending half the fall in the Tema Q Cultural Studies Department at Linkoping University, Sweden, and the other half in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, England, working with EUNAMUS as they wrap up the project and produce several reports, a final monograph, and a set of of policy recommendations, as well as conducting a final conference in Budapest for museum professionals, researchers, and policy makers from throughout Europe. I’ve also been asked to lecture on my research.
I am currently finishing my own project on national identification in national museums. Over the past three years, my research has taken me to nearly 20 countries on six continents to study how museums promote and reflect particular narratives of the past, characteristics of the present, and questions/desires for the future. How museum narratives can inform our understanding of the role of epideictic space in creating individual identification with the imagined community is the underlying basis of my project. This opportunity to work across disciplines with the researchers of EUNAMUS is a tremendous boon not only to my current book project but really to all my future work. As a Burke scholar, the idea of knowledge cutting across disciplines and borders has always been my rhetorical ideal, so this really is a golden opportunity to grow in those directions, as well as having the chance to contribute something useful to stakeholders beyond the university.