#  Race, Representation & Museums 

 



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Most recent public lectures are video-recorded. Click the title for the speaker name, a full description of the talk, and a transcript.



 

  [### Video: Anxieties about Race in Egyptology and Egyptomania, 1890–1960

 ](/video-anxieties-about-race-egyptology-and-egyptomania-1890%E2%80%931960) Despite ideals of scientific and scholarly objectivity, both Egyptologists and non-specialists have often projected their own racial anxieties onto ancient Egypt. Recurrent attempts to prove that the ancient Egyptians were white or black, for example... 

 

 

   [### Video: Get Them before They’re Gone: From Collecting Cultural Objects to Collaborating with Communities

 ](/video-get-them-they%E2%80%99re-gone-collecting-cultural-objects-collaborating-communities) The United States was in the early stages of Reconstruction when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, mandating that “all persons born in the United States” with the exception of American Indians be declared citizens. That December, the tension... 

 

 

   [### Video: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make: European Social Theory and the Real-Life “Fetish”

 ](/video-marx-freud-and-gods-black-people-make-european-social-theory-and-real-life-fetish) Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, the term “fetish” has invoked African gods as a metaphor for what European social critics believe to be disorders in European thought. Yet African gods have a... 

 

 

   [### Video: Smashing Agassiz’s Boulder

 ](/video-smashing-agassiz%E2%80%99s-boulder) In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin proposed that all humans share a common ancestor and that evolution likely began in Africa. He expected controversy over his revolutionary idea, even suggesting that Harvard professor Louis Agassiz might...