Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, September 7 – 08, 2016

Museums and Galleries History Group Biennial Conference
Gendering Museum Histories

This conference addresses the relationship between museums, galleries
and gender during the last 400 years. Museums can be understood as
buildings, institutions, collections, displays, interpretations and
groups of people; each of these aspects has both reflected and shaped
ideas about gender and its construction and meaning. While the
gendering of collections and museum displays has attracted some
attention (for example Porter 1990; Machin 2008), too often other
gendered aspects of museum and gallery history, such as employment
practices or visitors, have been mentioned only in passing, yet it
seems likely that museums have been responsible both for defining and
for subverting gender roles and identities. This conference aims to
draw attention to this topic, and to bring ideas and practices relating
to gender from different periods of museum history into productive
dialogue.

We are delighted that the keynote speaker will be Merete Ipsen,
Director of the Women¹s Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, who will be speaking
about gender in museums between the 1970s and the present.