Future of the Museum

When: Monday, July 18, 2022, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Where: Online

Workshop 3

A part of Memory in the Middle East and North Africa series

The history of museums in, and of, North Africa and the Middle East is inextricable from histories of colonisation. From their inception in the nineteenth century, these institutions have faced pressing questions: what was their mission? What heritage, whose memory, and which period should they represent? What was the relationship between local populations and often elite or state-run museums? Even today, in what is considered the post-colonial period, these questions have remained fully relevant – and now they are joined by new ones. What is the fate of the physical museum in the digital age? In this workshop, we will bring together both museum curators and museum studies scholars to examine the state of today’s museums in North Africa and the Middle East, with a particular focus on the status of museums as potential sites of memory for minority, marginalized, and historically disadvantaged groups.  

The workshop will bring together academics and museum curators from Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt to present the situation of the minorities’ heritage in museums and the problems that their conservation raises. The speakers are Habib Kazdaghli (University of Manouba - Tunisia), Zhor Rehihil (Museum of Moroccan Judaism) and Nermine Khafagi (Grand Egyptian Museum). 

Please contact Dr Afef Mbarek via email to register your interest. 

About the workshop series

This three-part workshop series focuses on three archetypal modern sites of memory production – archives, museums, and narratives – to examine how memory is mobilised and contested across the Middle East and North Africa today. The workshops will bring together academics in history and modern languages alongside archivists, curators, writers, and translators to explore questions of preservation, curation, and representation.

Co-organised by the colleagues from Queen Mary University of London Dr Afef Mbarek (History), Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar (Languages, Linguistics and Film) and Dr Rebekah Vince (Languages, Linguistics and Film).