Prof. Dr. Thomas Thiemeyer

Thomas Thiemeyer is professor of Museum Studies at the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, the department for Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. From 2003 to 2006, he worked as a curator at HG Merz, an architecture and museum design firm, where he aided in developing the concepts for the Mercedes-Benz Museum (2006) and the Porsche-Museum (2009). From 2006 to 2009, he completed his PhD under Gottfried Korf on the topic of the presentation of WWI and WWII in museums (Fortsetzung des Krieges mit anderen Mitteln. Die beiden Weltkriege im Museum [Continuing the War with New Instruments: The World Wars in the Museum], Schoeningh 2010). From 2009 to 2012 he coordinated the museum studies research project wissen&museum (Knowledge and the Museum), a cooperation between the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the Ludwig-Uhland-Institute, the Kunsthistorisches Institut, and the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien. In 2011, he became a junior professor at the Ludwig-Uhland-Institute where he is full professor since 2016.

His research and teaching is focused on museum and archival research, memorial culture, and cultural theory. He is currently supervising various projects, one on scenography in exhibitions (funded by the DFG, or German Research Foundation), one on how German museums deal with collections from the colonial era (funded by the Exploration Fund), and one on the remembrance of the Shoah in Israel and Germany (funded by the Baden-Württemberg-Stiftung). His latest books, 'Das Depot als Versprechen – Warum unsere Museen die Lagerräume ihrer Dinge wiederentdecken' ('The Storeroom as Promise – Why our Museums are Rediscovering their Objects’ Storage Spaces') and 'Geschichte im Museum: Theorie - Praxis - Berufsfelder' ('History in Museums'), were published in 2018.
Current research projects