Spaces for Shaping the Nation: National Museums and National Galleries in the 19th Century Europe

As spaces of knowledge, the national museums and galleries of nineteenth-century Europe played an important role both in the shaping of nation-states and the education of their populations. In this context, such institutions sought to convey the history of the people, for example by displaying pictorial cycles of important scenes from their history, exhibiting objects associated with certain formative events, or arraying period rooms to promote a specific impression of the past. The contributions to this volume examine the purposes and educational strategies of national museums and national galleries via case studies from Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Christina Strunck (Prof. Dr.) is chair of the Institute of Art History at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Between 2018 and 2023 she directed the research group »Modellierung von Kulturgeschichte am Beispiel des Germanischen Nationalmuseums: Vermittlungskonzepte für das 21. Jahrhundert« (»Shaping Cultural History: The History of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and Curatorial Lessons for the 21st Century«), funded by VolkswagenStiftung. Her current research deals with transnational and interconfessional translation processes in British art and architecture (1603-1750).
Marina Beck, born in 1982, has been working at the Institute for Art History at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2018. The art historian did her doctorate at the Universität Trier where she worked on a DFG research project at the Institute of Art History (2010-2016). From 2017 to 2018 she worked at the Oberhausmuseum Passau. Her research focuses on museums and collections in the 19th century, especially cultural history museums, with an emphasis on army museums and regional museums.