Dr Jennifer Walklate

Biography

I am a museologist, historian and literary theorist, studying the intersections between museums and other cultural media, including literature, drama and comics. I utilize novelistic and poetic forms and concepts to open up new ways of considering visitor experience in museum contexts, and literature as an analytical framework for understanding the construction and performance of museums. Drawing upon this study, I am looking at new ways to create more representative, inclusive, egalitarian, and intellectually open institutions.

I completed a PhD at the School of Museum Studies, Leicester, in 2013, and an MA in 2009. I have worked as a Collections Assessor, Research Assistant, Editor, and Docent, and have volunteered with the Galleries of Justice Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Royal Shakespeare Company Collections. I am a member of the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG), the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Ethnography (ICME), and work as editor for Museum & Society, and the Best in Heritage Projects of Influence Award.

Research Overview

Current Research

I am currently writing a monograph with the working title Textual Ecologies: Museum Cataloguing in the Long Nineteenth Century. This is based on a Carnegie Trust funded research project, Documentary Ethnographies, which examined changing practices in museum documentation across the 530 year history of the University of Aberdeen. This draws on my interest in documentation, and how it can inform us about museum attitudes, staff roles and relationships, object and collection histories, and displays, past and present. 

I am also working to write up the research for the European Crucible funded project Science and Human Histories, which compares contemporary science communication with practices of the Englightenment, in particular through a study of the objects, lectures and demonstrations left to us by Professor Patrick Copland.

I continue to research and write on negative and ambiguous affect in museum spaces, such as the grotesque, the uncanny, hauntings, forgetting, loss, grief and anxiety. I write on anxiety and unease as powerful productive forces in museum spaces, and their relation to contemporary activism, within and without museums. In a contribution to Knell's The Contemporary Museum: Shaping Museums for the Global Now, I argue that anxiety has the potential to produce a radical critique of museum practice and museology.

Past Research

Some of these projects arise from my AHRC Funded PhD thesis, Timescapes: The Production of Temporality in Literature and Museums. This thesis considered how temporal experience is manipulated in museums, and how this affects their performance and the people who interact with them using literary production and theory as analytical frameworks. It can be accessed via the Leicester Research Archive at http://hdl.handle.net/2381/27954. It was published by Routledge as Time and the Museum: Literature, Phenomenology, and the Production of Radical Temporality

Collaborations

My current major collaboration is with Veronica Gonzalez-Fernandez (Departamento de Optica, Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Antonija Grubisic-Cabo (Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen) on the Science and Human Histories project, funded by European Crucible. You can find a podcast on our project here at Episode 6, Science Communication.

Funding and Grants

2022-2024, European Crucible, Science and Human Histories

2020-2022, Carnegie Trust, Documentary Ethnographies

2009-2013, AHRC funded PhD, Museum Studies, University of Leicester

Teaching Responsibilities

My primary teaching responsibilities are postgraduate. On campus I co-ordinate AT5050: Museums and the Digital World, the careers focused AT5055: Museum Pathways, and AT5913: Museum Studies Placement. In this latter, students have worked with the McManus Dundee, Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, the Gordon Highlanders Museum, Discovery Point Dundee and more.

I also lead our On Demand offer in Museum Studies, with AT5551: Digital Museum Practice, and AT5052: Museums and Sustainable Futures. These courses are popular with, but not limited to, individuals working in the museum sector.

I am also involved in teaching on the following programmes:

AT5043: Researching Museum Collections

AT5526: The Museum Idea

AT5556: Museum Professional Practice

AT5531: Research in Social Anthropology

IH5001: Decolonizing Society and Politics

SL3504: Global Challenges in an Ethnographic Perspective

I supervise undergraduate dissertations in anthropology, in particular those with a museological, historical or material culture angle.

Non-course Teaching Responsibilities

I am a personal tutor and academic integrity officer. I sit on the School Education Committee, and am a Fellow of the HEA.