Affiliation: Harvard Art Museums
Dr. Jennifer G. Thum is the Inga Maren Otto Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, as well as a Museum Educator for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. She holds her degrees from Brown University (Ph.D.), University of Oxford, and Barnard College. Her field of research is Egyptology, with specializations in Egyptian royal living-rock stelae, Egyptian bronze “reliquaries”, and the Fayum portraits. Her current publication projects include “Sensing Alterity in the Landscapes of Egyptian Royal Living-Rock Stelae in A Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East (ed. by K. Neumann and A.K. Thomason, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, forthcoming), and several articles for Megiddo VI: The 2010-2014 Seasons (ed. by I. Finkelstein, Tel Aviv University Press, forthcoming).
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!
