Letter from Director/MSP campaign, December 2017

It has been a busy year in the Museum Studies Program and as the holiday season draws near I am taking this this opportunity to touch base with our alumni, friends, and supporters and ask for your support. Since we admitted our first cohort in 2003, MSP has striven to create a unique interdisciplinary community of graduate students, faculty, and campus and regional museum professionals who share an interest in museums: as sites of study and as sites of practice. Each year we admit approximately a dozen Masters or Doctoral Students into the Graduate Certificate Program. To date more than 160 students from ten colleges and more than 30 academic departments have pursued the certificate. They come from disciplines as diverse as astronomy, anthropology, biology, classical archaeology, education, information sciences, law, art history, art and design, urban planning, and public policy, among others. This year, we have added a poet and social worker to our disciplinary mix!  The diversity of the program and of the community we create sometimes challenges and always reshapes students’ understandings of their own disciplines and careers. Even in a University as committed to interdisciplinarity as the University of Michigan, the transformative experiences provided by MSP are truly special.

We had a special treat this fall when our MSP17 cohort traveled to Chicago over Fall Break. We visited and met with staff of four museums: the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Jane Adams Hull House Museum, Adler Planetarium, and the Field Museum of Natural History. At the end of a long day, a few hardy souls made it to the incubator where Lisa Yun Lee is developing the new National Public Housing Museum. And thanks to Lisa, we were able to have lunch with the Museum and Exhibition Studies graduate students and faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago. We thank the leadership and staff of these museums and all of the museums that generously host our Friday site visits that allow MSP students to meet with museums leaders in our area throughout the year.

Our MSP alumni continue to rack up impressive successes. For a sampler of our alumni’s recent accomplishments: Kate Larson (MSP10) has taken a position as Assistant Curator of Ancient and Islamic Glass at the Corning Museum of Glass; John Kannenberg (MSP10) is the founder, director, and chief curator of the Museum of Portable Sound (www.museumofportablesound.com); Rachel Chamberlain (MSP14) is the Education Outreach Coordinator at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art; Courtney Cottrell  (MSP12) defended her dissertation exploring the representation of Native Americans in German and US ethnographic museums and is a Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellow in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And we were excited to welcome Joe Cialdella (MSP09) back to U-M in his new position as Academic Program Manager for Public Scholarship in the Rackham Graduate School and member of the MSP faculty steering committee. We regularly brag about our alumni on our website: http://www.ummsp.rackham.umich.edu/content/kudos. Please visit to learn more about our alumni and let us know if you have news we can share.

Throughout 2017, the University has been celebrating its bicentennial year. MSP has been active in bicentennial activities. Our fall lecture series focuses on the past, present and future of university museums and features four conversations between U-M museum leaders and counterparts from other leading university museums. In addition, Professor Kerstin Barndt (German Studies and MSP) and I were delighted to celebrate the publication of our co-edited book Object Lessons and the Formation of Knowledge: University of Michigan Museums, Libraries and Collections 1817-2017 (University of Michigan Press), with contributions by more than three dozen authors. Working with artists Richard Barnes and Amanda Krugliak (Institute for the Humanities), Kerstin has co-curated a powerful exhibition: Object Lessons: Recollecting Museum Histories at Michigan. The exhibition is on view until December 30 in the former library space on the second floor of the Ruthven Museums Building. Kelsey Museum Director Terry Wilfong and I have co-curated a second bicentennial exhibition, Excavating Archaeology @ U-M: 1817-2017, open at the Kelsey Museum through May 27, 2018 (you can view the web version at https://lsa.umich.edu/kelsey/exhibitions/online-exhibitions.html).

We are currently finalizing our events for next semester. In February, we will host a day-long workshop on “Rethinking Historic House Museums,” which will feature a morning panel on campus and an afternoon visit to Fair Lane Estate. In late March, we will host visiting scholar Steven Lubar, Professor and Director of th Public Humanities Center at Brown University. Throughout the academic year, our Brown Bag Lecture series provides a context for our graduate students to present and critically examine their practicum experiences and for visiting museum scholars and professionals to present on their scholarship. And we continue to work with our 60-plus local and regional museum partners on capstone projects, site visits, and other ongoing collaborations.

MSP greatly benefits from generous support to our graduate students from the Rackham Graduate School and from the Museum Studies Endowment. Earnings from the endowment assist our graduate students in a variety of ways, allowing us to supplement internship costs, address emergency needs, and support faculty-student collaborative exhibition and research projects, as well as supporting student expenses for our annual Chicago trip. .

In addition, the MSP Director’s Strategic Fund supports our public programming, visiting scholar, special projects, and other MSP needs. Your gift will go directly to supporting MSP activities that enable us to maintain our commitment to bringing together museum theory with museum practice and our University community with the larger museum community of Michigan, Ohio, and the world.

To donate to MSP, please complete and return the attached card or go online to http://ummsp.rackham.umich.edu/about/support-msp/ . If you can consider a multi-year pledge to MSP, that would help us be able to plan our activities more effectively.

Finally, I encourage you to keep in touch. Please visit our web site, friend us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/umichmsp), or follow us on Twitter (@umichmsp). Brad, Amy and I love to hear from you!

Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you soon at one of our MSP events!

Warm regards,

Carla M. Sinopoli

Director, Museum Studies Program