A painting of a range of mountains with clouds scattered around the peaks.

Universal Histories and Universal Museums: A Transnational Comparison

‌Through transnational perspectives on museum collections, the project explores how history is made, displayed and disseminated through the uses, legacies and representations of the past. It explores the role of the museum in building knowledge about the future through collections, display and relations with publics.

The first phase of the project combined critical investigation through four workshops and two historical case studies, based in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Musée du quai Branly. The second phase considered the influence of social knowledge practices on the structuring of universal knowledge and how thinking about the past helps us to prepare for a global future that incorporates more diverse universalities. What kinds of history do we want or need today? The project’s second phase consolidated the research through an international conference, publications and digitisation of key archival resources timed to align with the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi – a contemporary universal museum.

A highly detailed depicting of a European market place in a large covered structure filled with people. — I’Interior of The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in Hyde Park, London, England’, 1851, Alamy Stock Photo ID BYEATN

The first two phases of this research project and digital exhibition (Universal Histories website), was funded by the AHRC and Labex ‘pasts in the present’, with co-investigator Professor Hervé Inglebert, Professor of Roman History at the University Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. The project commenced at the V&A (V&A Research Project Universal Histories) and continued at Lancaster University, (‘Universal Histories and Universal Museums’ research project).

In its current phase the project is continuing the research on temporality, interdisciplinarity and the museum through examination of proleptic objects: how they seem to anticipate their future form, function or symbolic meaning.

‌Arts and Humanities Research Council and LABEX, Research Grants

Project Leads: Professor Sandra Kemp, AHRC, and Professor Hervé Inglebert, LABEX