Collections in Circulation: Mobile Museum Conference, 9-10 May 2019

Dear Members of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science,

I am writing to you as I believe that the upcoming conference ‘Collections in Circulation’, to be held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on Thursday 9th and Friday 10th May 2019, will be of interest to your association.

The conference will bring together scholars from the UK and overseas with a shared interest in the mobility of museum collections, past and present. Their papers will address various aspects of the history of the circulation of objects and their re-mobilisation in the context of object exchange, educational projects and community engagement.

The conference is organised by the AHRC-funded Mobile Museum project, a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The research project explores the movement of objects into and out of the Economic Botany Collection at Kew, established in 1847. Botanical specimens and artefacts made of plant materials were sent to Kew from all over the world, and a large quantity were re-circulated to schools, museums and botanic gardens in the UK and overseas.

Australian institutions including botanic gardens and museums in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane were key recipients of this material. You can read a more detailed account of our research on economic botany collections in Australia here:

https://intranet.royalholloway.ac.uk/geography/research/mobile-museum/news/news-articles/the-one-where-caroline-mark-go-to-australia.aspx

We are very pleased to announce that registration has opened for the conference, and hope that you will be interested in promoting it via your newsletter / networks / media channels.

Confirmed speakers include Claudia Augustat, Paul Basu, Joshua Bell, Martha Fleming, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Luciana Martins, Wayne Modest, Catherine Nichols, Jude Philp and Daniel Simpson.

Full details of the programme and a link to booking registration are now available at:

https://royalholloway.ac.uk/mobilemuseum/conference

The image which we are using across our conference publicity (a C19th Japanese paper sample from Kew’s Economic Botany Collection).

Warm Regards,

Harriet Gendall

Project Officer
Kew Mobile Museum
Economic Botany Collection
020 8332 5771
@KewMobileMuseum