Emotions, Gender and Material Culture: Historical Perspectives on Museum Collections

This project brings together histories of emotions, gender and material culture with museum curatorial practises and heritage studies. The project will involve a close partnership with Northampton Museum and Art Gallery and associated libraries/museums in Northamptonshire as stakeholders and beneficiaries, part of a developing relationship between the Centre for Historical Studies and NMAG. This will include four main activities organised by the principal applicant, Matthew McCormack and a postdoctoral researcher. The first will be a CPD workshop at UON for museum curators aiming to provide a transfer of knowledge from Mark Rothery, Matthew McCormack and one postdoctoral researcher on the history of emotions, gender and material culture. The second will be a day spent in NMAG selecting twenty objects, with museum staff, to serve as examples of interpretation from the perspective of the fields of emotions, gender and material culture. The third will be a CPD workshop at UON at which the museum curators will present their interpretative findings of the ten objects. The final activity will be a public symposium at NMAG where the historians and the curators will collectively present their research findings and their experiences of the process. The project is based on ongoing research conducted by Professor Mark Rothery, Professor Matthew McCormack in the fields of emotions, gender and material culture. ‘Emotions, Gender and Material Culture’ will upskill the museum curators with knowledge and skills to better interpret their collections and to engage with these recently emerging fields of historical enquiry. This will feed through to a wider public impact through public engagement with the museums around these universal human experiences of emotion and touch. The activities will inform two forthcoming exhibitions at NMAG, focused on the history of shoemaking and dissent in the history of Northampton. We will collect impact statements at the time of each activity – we will then reconnect with the participants in six months and review the way these activities have shaped practice beyond the life of the project.

This project exchanges knowledge between historians and heritage providers over the course of three meetings in order to better understand how emotions can be invested in objects, how objects evoke emotions and how gender interacts with emotions and objects