l From the Graduate Students Forum column of the
February 2004 Perspectives
Doing History in Exhibit Halls:
The History
PhD and a Museum Career
by Louise Pubols
Few newly minted history PhDs imagine a future
for themselves outside of the ivy-adorned walls of academe. Yet
their skills and qualifications make them hot property in other
venues. Four years ago, I took my history degree to a museum's
curatorial department and in this short essay, I share what I've
learned about life in the exhibit hall and in the corridors of
collections storage.
At the most basic level, history museums are institutions that
display historical artifacts, or reproductions or representations
of artifacts, in an effort to teach about the past. They can take
a wide variety of forms. Most of us know traditional institutions
like the Smithsonian or the Chicago Historical Society—places that
tell a national or regional story. But history museums also
include furnished houses, living history villages and farms,
historic sites, and even "virtual" museums on the Web. Taken
together, there are more history museums and sites than all other
kinds of museums combined.
Yet, compared with natural history or art museums, most history
museums are relatively new. About half were founded after 1960.
This means that the relationship between professional historians,
the academy, and the museum world is still developing.
Traditionally, professional scholars in art, anthropology, and the
natural sciences have found support and direction in the museum
world, while historians, with little interest in artifacts as
evidence, felt less at home there. A growing interest in social
history changed that relationship in the course of the 20th
century. Many historians in the academy now turn to material
culture as a primary source to fill in gaps in the historical
record. At the same time, historians have been looking for ways to
bring their work to wider audiences, and finding museum
exhibitions the perfect venue.
Sounds interesting, but what, in fact, would you do all day?
You'd be key to the creation of exhibitions in several ways: as a
scholar, as a curator, and as project manager. In addition, you
would be developing the museum's collections, working with donors,
and speaking to a variety of audiences about your museum's
mission.
Most PhD programs prepare you well for the role of scholar who
can help develop the initial ideas for exhibitions—reading and
synthesizing, creating the thesis and outlines for exhibitions,
and writing and editing label copy. You'll find the latter job
easier if your program also emphasizes writing accessibly, and if
you enjoy the challenge of expressing complex ideas in labels of
no more than 100 words.
Museums can offer great opportunities for scholars to reach an
incredibly broad and deep audience. More than 100 million people
visit history museums and historic sites each year. At the museum
where I work, visitors range from fourth graders to history buffs,
and from families looking for something fun to do with their
children to diligent scholars. They may include people with
disabilities and those who find it difficult to comprehend texts
in English. Writing labels and designing exhibitions for such a
varied audience can be tricky, but museum historians have the
benefit of doing surveys to test preconceptions. For example, for
a new permanent gallery covering the history of the West to the
1850s, we discovered that most visitors, even in southern
California, confessed ignorance about the region's Spanish and
Mexican past. On the other hand, most had very strong notions of
Native American culture, much of it wrong. Armed with this
knowledge, we are crafting an experience that meets our audience
where they are now, and helps them discover new things in terms
that make sense to them.
Of course, creating an exhibit involves much more than writing
label copy. As a curator, you'll be charged with finding
collections, and putting them together to tell your story. And
this, I think, presents real challenges to those of us who are
primarily trained to produce monographs. Exhibitions are not
linear, and not even a majority of people will read every label in
the right sequence. You and the exhibit designer have to be able
to create a context for the artifacts that can be entered in many
ways, and a floorplan that will make sense even if visitors run
through it backwards.
Artifacts present their own challenges. Not only will visitors
not read every carefully parsed label, they also generally respond
much more immediately to things and to art, and even without any
context they will supply it themselves. "How is this used? What
would I look like in those clothes? Could I have lived like that?
How is that like what I use every day?" Artifacts are not very
good for telling dramatic stories or for making a sustained
intellectual argument. But artifacts can bring immediacy to the
lived experience of the past, offering visitors a snapshot of the
material world. Often, they are the only record left by those
without access to print culture—women, native people, and the
working classes, for example. As a curator, you need to feel
comfortable creating a script that works with the messages
visitors will get directly from the objects themselves.
Collections development thus becomes a critical part of your
job, because it gives you or future curators the tools to
interpret a fuller range of history. There are many challenges
here. Sometimes you'll find that the types of things offered to,
or that are already in, your museum can push your interpretation
in directions that you may not necessarily want. Many 19th-, and
even 20th-century collectors aimed at finding the best, the most
beautiful, or the most representative artifact of the dominant
culture at the expense of the material life of ordinary or
marginalized people.
Active collecting leads you outward, letting the public know
what kinds of history you're interested in telling, and what kinds
of objects you want for the collections. As a public figure,
you'll likely be asked to give interviews or talks, and to speak
in an engaging way to general audiences, community leaders,
collectors, and donors, as well as those who might not feel at
home in the halls of imposing museums.
Finally, as a project manager, you have to be able to see the
big picture and oversee the whole process of exhibition
development from start to finish. As a member of a team, you have
to be flexible and able to work with a variety of disciplines.
When the educator tells you that you're writing at a 12th-grade
level and you need to write at an 8th-grade level, you have to be
willing to rewrite. When the designer tells you that all the
objects you want will make the exhibit case cluttered and
unreadable, you have to be willing to trust his or her eye. I've
actually found this part of the job the most rewarding, as I've
had to learn new skills and a common vocabulary to collaborate on
such complex projects.
All of this sounds great, I know, but you have a few lingering
doubts. So I want to turn, finally, to how you might develop a
career in a museum.
Can a museum historian still be a publishing scholar?
Usually exhibitions aren't given the same peer or critical
review as a monograph would be (although that's changing). So you
still may want to develop a record as a publishing scholar, even
if your museum doesn't require it for promotion.
Museums operate on a 12-month calendar, and your workday will
be 9 to 6, or later. This may be the hardest thing for a graduate
student to adjust to. You should ask a potential employer how
often the curators or researchers on staff publish or present
scholarly papers. Does the museum offer support for research trips
or writing time? Will you be expected to write exhibit catalogues?
In general, public institutions are not well funded but they have
a better structure for providing comp time and release time for
doing your own research projects. Private institutions are better
funded but put more emphasis on the constant production of
exhibitions.
Can one go back to the university?
That depends. Your classroom teaching credentials will grow
stale after a couple of years working in a museum, unless you
teach as an adjunct on the side. Think about whether this is an
option you'd like to leave open, and if it's possible to do so in
your region. The transition has been done, but it isn't easy and
requires planning.
How will work be evaluated, and what are the steps of
promotion?
You'll be giving up the possibility of tenure, but also the
inexorable ticking of the tenure clock. Some museums have a
well-defined series of steps from assistant curator, to associate
curator to senior or chief curator but this is often not the case
when staffs are small. In fact, at many small institutions you'll
be asked to do multiple jobs that may include education,
collections processing, or management.
Will intellectual independence be lost without tenure?
Goverment initiatives and demands may shape what topics you'd
be working on in a public institution. In private museums, donors
may try to influence what topics you'll be working on. There are
always such pressures, because you will be relying on fundraising,
but a museum with high ethical standards will never change their
message to suit funders.
How much does it pay?
From American Association of Museums (AAM) surveys and
anecdotal evidence, pay structure and benefits in museums are
comparable to those in other job tracks.
This sounds great!
How do I get a job?
Ads for museum positions usually show up in
Perspectives and the H-Net service, but the chief
equivalent for the museum world is Aviso, the newsletter
of the AAM. Look there to see what kinds of professional concerns
are being debated, and what kinds of qualifications museums are
looking for.
In order to make yourself attractive to search committees, it's
a good idea to develop competence in the interpretation of visual
and material culture. This is something you will have to seek out,
either in material culture or art history courses, or in museums
themselves. Depending on your aspirations, it isn't a bad idea to
prepare yourself to be as flexible as possible—by taking business
or education classes, for example. But first and foremost, get the
best historical training you can.
Good luck!
—Louise Pubols is
historian at the Museum of the West (formerly known as the Autry
Museum of Western Heritage) in Los Angeles.
She is currently
working on a major reinterpretation of the permanent galleries
"Encounters" and "Journeys."
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