Staff Profile
Professor Christopher Whitehead
Dean of Global - Humanities and Social Sciences; Professor of Museology
- Email: chris.whitehead@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 5985
- Address: Arts and Cultures
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
Background
I joined the University in July 2002. Prior to this, I worked as a museum curator, a lecturer in Art History and sometime languages teacher, translator and interpreter in the UK, in Italy and in the US.
Qualifications
- BA in Art History (University of Leicester), 1993
- MA in Museum Studies (University of Leicester), 1994
- PhD in Art History and Theory (Perfezionamento in Storia della Critica d'Arte) (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), 1999
- Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (Newcastle University), 2003
Memberships/affiliations
Museums and Galleries History Group
I am Honorary Professor at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University.
Languages
Fluent Italian; improving Turkish; reading skills in French and Spanish.
Google scholar: Click here.
Twitter: @chrisw_heritage
Research Interests
I trained and worked as an art historian and art curator, but my research activities today are much broader and borrow approaches and interests from anthropology, geography, cultural theory, political science, design research, digital cultures and the theory of history. Most of my current work explores heritage, memory and geopolitics, community heritages, affect and emotion, ontology and epistemology, social conflict, and historical consciousness. I have finally got round to writing the book on the theory and practice of display analysis that has been waiting to be written for the last 20 years.
I have recently completed the co-ordination of two large projects:
1. The EU-funded CoHERE project, a €2.5million Horizon 2020 study into European Heritages and Identities, working with 11 other organisations across Europe.
2. The Katip-Celebi Newton fund project Plural Heritages of Istanbul: the case of the Land Walls.
Before this I managed the Newcastle University work package of the EU FP7 'MELA' project: European Museums and Libraries in/of the Age of Migrations - a €2.7million award working with 8 other institutions across Europe, led by the Politecnico di Milano. Publications can be accessed here.
Alongside these activities I maintain research interests in the general areas covered in my monographs on the 19th-Century Art Museum (Routledge 2005, soon to be part of the Routledge Historical Resource on 19th-Century British Society), Museums and the Construction of Disciplines (Bloomsbury 2009) and Interpreting Art in Museums and Galleries (Routledge 2012). My most recent books are the edited volumes Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe (Ashgate/Routledge 2015), Dimensions of Heritage and Memory: Multiple Europes and the Politics of Crisis, (Routledge 2019 - several chapters of which are available open access) and the monograph Plural Heritages and Community Co-production: designing, walking and remembering (Routledge 2021).
I am series editor (with Professor Peter Stone and Professor Peter Davis) of the Heritage Matters book series published by Boydell and Brewer. I am on the editorial Boards of Museum and Society, Museum History Journal, the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy and Curator: the Museum Journal. I am co-editor of the Routledge book series Critical Heritages of Europe.
Postgraduate Supervision
I am currently supervising the following doctoral research projects
- Decolonising Scandinavian Museums (Muhammed Topdaş)
I have supervised Claire Pike, Susannah Eckersley, Gabriella Petkova, Pamela Erskine-Loftus, Alex Elwick, Yun-ju Chen, Bronwen Colquhoun, Emma Coffield, Gabriella Arrigoni, Carolyn Gibeson, Rebecca Farley, Jen Locke, David Farrell-Banks, Briony Carlin, Alistair Robinson, and Hannah Marsden, all of whom have successfully completed their PhDs.
I can take on new students as and when my current students submit and complete. On that proviso, I am interested in supervising doctoral students with a fundamental interest in cultural politics and an openness to theory who wish to work on (in no particular order of preference):
- memory studies, difficult history, uses of the past
- sensory, affective and experimental ethnographies for heritage and memory studies
- heritage ontologies and epistemologies
- heritage and geopolitics
- personal, minority and non-official heritages
- museum and gallery history
- heritage, time and place
- museums and heritage in the EU, European identities
- museums and migration
- museums, cultural heritage and contemporary social conflicts and tensions
- museums and cultural heritage in the UK, in Turkey, in Italy, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand
- experimental histories in museums (e.g. uses of global history, conceptual history, micro-history etc.)
Please contact me if you would like to enquire about studying for a research degree under my supervision.
Work with the heritage sector
All of my scholarly work is in some way intended to benefit the sector and cultural policy makers, including the provision of recommendations for practice, training and building reflexive awareness of key issues (both past and present) for museums, galleries, heritage and society. I have also co-produced exhibitions, such as the permanent display 'Northern Spirit' at the Laing Art Gallery, and have provided advice for museums such as the Natural History Museum, the Manchester Museum, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, and the National Gallery in London. I am an active contributor to international and European ICOM workshops. In 2017 I was a member of the Scientific Committee for the International Museum Day theme of 'Museums and Contested Histories', and videos relating to this can be seen here. I wok closely with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.
Keywords
heritage; museums; memory; cultural and social theory and politics; affect and emotion; art curatorship; art theory; epistemology; display; art interpretation; museum history; social constructionism; ontologies; disciplinarity; place; time; migration; EU; difficult history; uses of the past; cultural politics; identity; representation; communities; co-production.
Recent and forthcoming talks
- Invited talk, 'Museums and Forced Migration: empathy politics and the difficult heritage of the future', University of Oslo, October 2020
- 'Europe on Edge: concepts and affects of edgy heritage', Association of Critical Heritage Studies 'Heritage Futures' conference, London, August 2020
- Invited talk, International Symposium for the Museum of World Cultures in Korea, November 2019
- Keynote, Edgy Heritages of Europe and Creative Ethnography, International Research Conference on Culture Crossroads, Riga, Latvian Academy of Culture, October 2019
- Keynote, 'European Museums, Mutations and Migrations' Museo Picasso Malaga, September 2019
- Invited talk, 'Edgy Heritages: the forcefields of Europe', Deakin University, Melbourne, August 2019
- Invited talk (with G. Bozoğlu), ‘Heritage and Activism’, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, September 2019
- Public lecture, ‘Heritage and Crisis, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, August 2019
- Invited talk, ‘Heritage and Brexit’, Newcastle University Interdisciplinary Brexit Forum, May 2019
- Invited talk, ‘Making Wartime Controlled Ruins into Sites of Memory in Warsaw’, POLIN Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, Warsaw, November 2018, March 2019
- ‘The Idea of Plural Heritages’, Istanbul Anamed Koç University, December 2018
- Productions and Omissions of European Heritage, POLIN Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, Warsaw, November 2018
- Keynote, ‘European Heritage and Social Division’, ICOM National Committees of Austria, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, ‘Planning an extended museum, Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów, November 2018
- Invited talk, ‘Museums, divided society, and the nature of peace’, UNESCO International Forum on Museums without Borders: Creating bonds and a culture of peace through intercultural dialogue in museums of the 21st century, November 2018, Puebla, Mexico, Museo Internacional del Barroco
- Framing European Heritage Policy in Times of Crisis, European Network of Cultural Centres, Brussels, October 2018'
- Plural Heritages of Istanbul’, UNESCO Wold Heritage Site Management Directorate, Istanbul, July 2018
- Invited talk, ‘Critical Heritages of EUrope’, University of Malmo, Sweden, June 2018
- 'Food, Heritage and Nostalgia in an English Open-Air Museum', University of Bologna, March 2018
- Invited talk, 'Museums and an Extroverted Sense of Place', Reykjavik University, January 2018
- Keynote, 'Critical, Playful, Plural Heritages', CHEurope conference, University of Amsterdam, January 2018
- History UK Plenary address, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 4 November 2017
- ‘Geohistories of Responsibility’, plenary address, Curating History conference, European University Institute, Florence, 11-13 October 2017https://curatinghistory.wordpress.com
- Keynote, AHRC Heritage Priority Area conference on ‘Heritage Studies: Critical Approaches and New Directions’, in association with the Association of Critical Heritage Studies UK Chapter, British Academy, London, 5 October 2017 https://ahrcheritage.wixsite.com/ahrcheritage/conference-heritage-studies-critica
- Invited paper: ‘Museums of Experience: stories of places and live in recent European museum practice’, Cultural History Museum, Oslo, 11 September 2017 https://www.khm.uio.no/besok-oss/historisk-museum/utstillinger/skiftende/2017/program-the-art-of-fiction-in-the-museum.pdf
- Keynote, ICOM Annual General Meeting, ‘Rethinking Difficult History: museums and serious play’, UNESCO, Paris, 7 June 2017
- (with T. Schofield, D. Foster-Smith and G. Bozoğlu) ‘Walking the Walls: ethnography, design and ‘heritage from below’ in Istanbul’, Ethnography on Foot II, Cultural Significance of Place research group, 1 June 2017
- Invited talk: ‘Long-term implications of Brexit for Heritage’, Brexit and Heritage, Newcastle University London Campus, 29 March 2017
- Invited talk: ‘Heuristic Uses of the Past: the Holocaust in museum education’ Geography Matters, National and Kapodostrian University of Athens, 23 March 2017
- Invited talk: ‘Critical Heritages of Europe?’ University of York, 14 February 2017;