Affiliation: Harvard Art Museums
Dr. Jen Thum is Associate Director of Academic & Campus Partnerships and a Research Curator at the Harvard Art Museums. In these roles she oversees university-level interdisciplinary learning; directs a gallery-teaching training program for graduate students across Harvard; facilitates object-based learning workshops for faculty and students; teaches the museums’ medical humanities programs; and works on research, teaching, and curatorial projects related to her expertise in ancient Egyptian art. Jen holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University and an M.Phil. in Egyptology from the University of Oxford. She is the author/editor of multiple publications at the intersection of Egyptology and museum pedagogy, including Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice and the forthcoming Objects of Inquiry: A Field Guide to Interdisciplinary Learning in Art Museums. Jen also currently serves as the Archaeological Institute of America’s Vice President for Outreach and Education.
Campus art museums are no longer the domain of art history alone. Approximately 80% of the teaching that happens at the Harvard Art Museums is for college courses outside of archaeology, ancient history, art, and art history, with staff regularly instructing students who do not consider themselves to be “museum people” or “art people.” Although all class visits to the museums are designed around their curricular goals, the underlying mission for every visit is to build students’ museum literacy and foster their museum-going identities. Ancient collections are uniquely positioned to address both of these aims, because they allow students to jump easily into topics such as provenance, responsible stewardship, conservation science, and the relationships between archaeology, museums, and the art market. In this interactive lecture, Egyptologist and museum educator Jen Thum shares surprising examples where ancient art has helped learners see and think in ways that span the temporal distance to address their contemporary lives and concerns. Among others, these include a medical humanities program for radiology residents–where practitioners who spend their workdays analyzing images learn to look at a new speed and find “human-to-human connections” at the museum–and an undergraduate course on Skepticism and Knowledge where recent changes to the museum’s ancient Egyptian gallery demonstrated the importance of intellectual humility and institutional transparency. Be forewarned that audience members will be encouraged to look closely and weigh in on what they see and think!
Egyptology and museums have come a long way in terms of ethical stewardship. Join Egyptologist and museum educator Jen Thum for an interactive look at ancient Egyptian artifacts in the care of the Harvard Art Museums that have been the focus of recent efforts to center ancient personhood, course-correct for unsavory past practices, and upend stereotypes about the ancient world. Be forewarned that audience members will be encouraged to look closely and weigh in on what they see and think!
