ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collaborations and Comparisons: international relations between science and technical museums over the longue durée

• In Event: Spirit of 1876: The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus: International Science Museum Links. 2

English Abstract

The state of the art in the history of science museums is sophisticated archive-informed accounts of individual museums. These accounts display at the periphery some awareness of the broader international scene, as well as some consciousness of more theoretical accounts of the field. But the question of the extent to which these museums were sui generis or strongly mutually influential has yet to receive sustained attention, notwithstanding the partially comparative frames of Stella Butler’s (1992) and Sam Alberti’s (2022) accounts. This paper takes in the SLCSA, the default international comparison of the late 1920s Museums of the New Age film project before considering some deliberate collaborations in the post second world war period and the recent past. Also acting as a kind of summary for the two sessions, this paper also makes a first stab at that question of mutual international influence.

Author

• Timothy Boon, UCL