Museums and Politics

This course is an introduction to both Museum Studies and its politics: practical, historical, and theoretical. To take full advantage of our location in Washington D.C., we will focus specifically on the organizational hierarchies and histories of the federal museum system (the Smithsonian Institution's 21 museums) and national funding agencies (NEA and NEH) as well as examine culture as a historical form of “soft power,” that morphed in a strategic campaign to consolidate political power during the Culture Wars of the 1990s, and again more recently, over the last ten years. The content of this course consists of lectures, class and group discussions, readings and one optional field trip.