V&A: Collecting to Shape and Reflect the Nation Conference

This article was first published by the V&A.

‘Collecting to Shape and Reflect the Nation: Changing Museum Strategies from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century’ Conference is a multifaceted exploration of how national museum collections were assembled, shape and reflect national identities.

The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) are collaborating to organise a pair of conferences exploring the relationship between museums’ histories and their future missions. This first conference examines how large-scale museums with national remits can critically engage with their own institutional pasts to inform their present-day identities and considers how these institutions can contribute to fostering social cohesion in increasingly diverse twenty-first-century societies.

Focusing on the formation, interpretation, and display of national collections, the conference takes as its point of departure a range of major museums and memory institutions founded or fundamentally reshaped amid the political and historical transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing together an international group of scholars and museum professionals, it explores how these institutions have shaped—and been shaped by—changing ideas of nationhood, identity, empire, and public responsibility.