DIMA - A Doctorate in the Museum

Sophie Eckhardt

Academic Career: Sophie Eckhardt MA, University of Tübingen, has studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen. During her studies she focused on museum ethnography and exhibition practices with an interest in collaborative and explorative exhibition-making. Her regional interest has so far been the continent of Africa. Her current research focuses on museum knowledge production and transfer. 

Project description: Sophie’s PhD project has the working title of „Exhibition-making in the 21st century. A process-accompanying research of an exhibition of the Linden-Museum Stuttgart“. It ties in with current debates on renegotiating the role and relevance of ethnographic museums in the 21st century. Using the Linden-Museum Stuttgart as an example, Sophie will analyse the role ethnographic museums can play in society today as institutions of knowledge production and communication. Her research will follow the whole process of ‘exhibition-making’ with reference to an exhibition at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart. This process will be examined as a central process of knowledge production in, through and about the museum in order to understand the extent to which knowledge is produced and communicated within the museum, especially from the curatorial perspective. Based on the current challenges facing ethnological museums, the planned research explores collaborative, creative, critical and alternative forms of museum knowledge production and exhibition-making. 

sophie.eckhardtspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de

Katharina Nowak

Academic Career: Katharina Nowak MA, University of Tübingen, studied Social and Cultural Anthropology, Communication and Media Studies in Bremen, as well as Museum Studies at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg. From April 2021 to March 2023, she worked as an assistant curator of the Oceania collections at the Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg. As a student, she completed internships at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and the Five Continents Museum in Munich. She has ongoing teaching appointments at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen. Her research interest is on collaborative forms of knowledge production and the decolonization of knowledge with a regional focus on Oceania, especially the Pacific Ocean’s island states. 

Project Description: This PhD project, entitled ‘The Decolonial Knowledge Production of Ethnographic Collections: Rethinking Museums’, focuses on ethnographic objects that were taken from the Pacific Ocean island states to Stuttgart and Tübingen during the colonial period. Katharina is interested in the different epistemic practices through which knowledge is produced in dealing with these objects. This applies to both the historical and contemporary contexts and everyday cultures from which they originate, and the practices of the collectors, dealers, curators and scholars who removed these objects from their everyday or ritual contexts, sometimes using violence and power. It was they who mobilized them, shipped them to Germany and sold, stored, researched, curated and still curate them within the walls of museums. The project asks how were and are these objects consciously remembered and/or forgotten, conceived and classified, produced and used, stolen or exchanged, researched and exhibited? The project will explore this from multiple perspectives in research focusing on collaborative forms of ethnographic knowledge production, the decolonization of knowledge and a regional interest in Papua New Guinea.

katharina.nowakspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de

Judith Zweck

Academic Career: Judith Zweck MA, University of Tübingen, studied Art History at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, and completed her MA degree in Provenance Research and the History of Collecting at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn. She is currently doing her doctorate at the Institute of History of the University of Tübingen. From April 2021 to September 2023, Judith worked as a research assistant in the Africa Department of the Cologne Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum. Her research focuses on provenance research and the art trade in non-European objects. 

Project Description: Judith’s PhD thesis, entitled ‘Blank Spaces in the Museum: Purchases and Sales of Museum Holdings to the Art Trade in the Period from 1945 to 1973 at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart’, examines the collections of the Linden-Museum that were acquired in that particular time period, as well as the museum’s relations with various art dealers. The project analyses the development of the collection in terms of both the acquisition and disposal of objects. Questions will be asked about the ‘sharpening of the collection’, and the economic, political and curatorial objectives of the collections will be examined and discussed on the basis of different approaches to provenance research. The doctoral project looks specifically at the ‘blank spaces’ in institutional history and aims to illuminate and fill these gaps by looking at the connections between the museum, art dealers, the collection(s), the provenance of the objects and the ‘cultures’ from which they originate. 

judith.zweckspam prevention@student.uni-tuebingen.de