According to the World Bank, one out of every seven people in the world today is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force.  Our cities are increasingly diverse—people from over 184 countries call London home. So how do we learn to get along? Museums have always played a leading role in creating nations and national citizens. In today’s global world, do they also create global citizens too?  This talk looks at how museums around the world are making sense of immigration and globalization. Based on first-hand conversations with museum directors, curators, and policymakers; their descriptions of current and future exhibitions; and the inside stories about the famous paintings and iconic objects that define their collections, I provide a close-up view of how different kinds of institutions balance nationalism and cosmopolitanism and what it is about particular cities and nations that explains the outcome. 

This talk is free to attend; no booking is required. Directions to the museum can be found here.

About the Speaker:

Peggy Levitt is Chair of the sociology department and the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies at Wellesley College and co-Director of Harvard University’s Transnational Studies Initiative. Her most recent book, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, was published by the University of California Press in July 2015. Peggy was the CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the American University of Cairo in March 2015 and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute in Summer 2015. In 2014, she received an Honorary Doctoral Degree from Maastricht University, held the Astor Visiting Professorship at Oxford University, and was a guest professor at the University of Vienna. She was the Visiting International Fellow at the Vrije University in Amsterdam from 2010–2012 and the Willie Brandt Guest Professor at the University of Malmö in 2009. Her books include Religion on the Edge (Oxford University Press, 2012), God Needs No Passport (New Press, 2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (Routledge, 2007). A film based on her work, Art Across Borders, came out in 2009.