Call for Articles | Expanding the Narrative of Historic House Museums
From ArtHist.net:
History Dis-placed: Expanding the Narrative of Historic House Museums
Volume edited by Karen Shelby and Emily Stokes-Rees
Proposals due by 31 October 2025
History Dis-placed: Expanding the Narrative of Historic House Museums concentrates on the unique histories and challenges of house museums through a time of unprecedented crisis and change. In addition to being historic landmarks, house museums can be sites of civic engagement and reflection, centers for activism and cultural discourse, and places for public events and gatherings. In the digital age, house-museums have had to renegotiate these identities and interactions with contemporary audiences through innovative practices. Together, the chapters in this volume collectively assert that HHMs can survive as important sources of local history, building support in the local community. These are museums that are challenging us to think differently, overturning conventional paradigms, and taking risks.
Historic house museums are becoming spaces not just of memory, but of activism, dialogue, and cultural regeneration. These changes reflect a growing awareness among museum professionals that the ‘living history’ techniques once popularized in the field may reinforce romanticized or incomplete narratives. Today, interpretive strategies must look beyond static domestic tableaux to explore how the house—as both a physical and symbolic space—contains multiple, often contested, histories. As Vagnone and Ryan assert, “The breath of a house is the living that takes place within it, not the structure or its contents” (2016, 21).
This volume addresses the evolving interpretive practices within historic house museums through four interrelated thematic sections: Visionary Programming, Beyond These Walls, Virtual Vitality, and Sites of Social Justice. Together, these sections reflect a growing movement within the field to reimagine not only what stories are told, but how, where, and for whom they are told. Each section explores a facet of this interpretive shift, offering case studies, theoretical insights, and practical approaches to reframing the work of house museums in the twenty-first century.
Visionary Programming
The first section, Visionary Programming, explores how historic house museums are implementing bold and innovative approaches to interpretation. Moving beyond traditional period rooms and didactic tours, these programs often prioritize collaboration with artists, scholars, descendant communities, and local stakeholders. Through immersive installations, performance-based experiences, and participatory storytelling, such programming seeks to foster emotional engagement, critical reflection, and a deeper sense of connection between past and present. The case studies in this section examine how curators and educators are reconfiguring house museums as sites of inquiry, experimentation, and shared authority.
Beyond These Walls
While the historic house itself remains a central interpretive anchor, many institutions are increasingly working to contextualize their narratives within broader spatial, social, and historical frameworks. The second section, Beyond These Walls, highlights efforts to extend interpretation beyond the physical boundaries of the house. Contributors consider how museums are addressing issues such as land dispossession, enslavement, migration, and community memory—often through partnerships, neighborhood-based initiatives, or landscape interpretation. By reframing the house as part of a larger network of historical and contemporary relationships, these approaches challenge insular narratives and reinforce the museum’s role within the public sphere.
Virtual Vitality
The third section, Virtual Vitality, addresses the increasing use of digital technologies to enhance access, engagement, and interpretation. As early as 1994, John Driscoll asked questions that remain salient today: what can we do with a digital museum? Is it possible to create a pro-active and creatively engaged audience? How can museums present a digital image of an object that functions as an artifact? And, for the purposes of the volume, how can house museums, despite digital and virtual programs, retain the intimacy and aura that differentiates them from other museums? While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual tools across the museum world, many institutions have since embraced the digital realm not as a substitute for physical visitation, but as a space for new forms of storytelling, education, and collaboration. From virtual tours and online exhibitions to digital archives and interactive platforms, this section explores how house museums are leveraging technology to reach wider and more diverse audiences. Contributors also reflect on the epistemological implications of digitization: what is gained, what is transformed, and what is lost when interpretation moves beyond material culture and embodied experience.
Sites of Social Justice
The fourth section will provide case studies that expand upon the research of Marianna Clair. Clair, in 2016, began to look into the connection among the appreciation of local heritage, the creation of activists in local communities, and how to educate citizens about social issues. An example is The Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of New York City. The museum presents and interprets a variety of immigrant experiences on the Lower East Side, but also draws on connections between the past and the present to underscore national conversations about immigration. But, as outlined in “House or Home? Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm,” the creation of new house museum over a century ago was to “protect and enshrine American virtue” that was guided by assimilation politics and beliefs. Thus, this chapter will address all types of historicized political activism (Potvin, 2010).
Together, these four sections articulate a vision of the historic house museum as a dynamic, inclusive, and socially engaged institution. Rather than serving solely as vessels of preservation, house museums are increasingly positioned as active participants in contemporary cultural and political discourse. This volume demonstrates how reimagined interpretive practices can make these sites more relevant, equitable, and responsive to the complexities of the histories they are entrusted to tell.
In this Call for Papers, we ask for contributions that examine how historic house museums are navigating decolonial practices, confronting difficult pasts, and opening space for marginalized voices in innovative new ways. The book explores a variety of themes, as they relate to the four thematic sections noted above. Contributors may address the following:
• The role of descendant communities in shaping interpretive direction
• New exhibition models for underrepresented histories
• House museums as civic spaces for protest, reflection, and healing
• Digital storytelling and participatory interpretation
• Theoretical frameworks for understanding domestic space as contested ground
Please submit abstracts of 250–500 words and a two-page CV to co-editors: Karen Shelby, karen.shelby@baruch.cuny.edu, and Emily Stokes-Rees, ewstokes@syr.edu.
AHRC Studentship | Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818)
From the British Library:
Rediscovering a Woman Collector at the British Library:
New Sources and Perspectives on Sarah Sophia Banks
Supervised by Felicity Myrone, Maddy Smith, and Alice Marples
Applications due by 28 November 2025
Extensive materials collected by Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818), one of the most important antiquarian collectors of her time, were divided at her death and are held across the British Library, Royal Mint, and Prints & Drawings and Coins & Medals departments at the British Museum. Varying institutional interests and practicalities have impacted their visibility, and the focus of scholarship to date has been on the holdings at the Museum and only her prints and ephemera in nine albums in the Library (L.R.301.h.3-11). This studentship will explore the significant holdings that are yet to be explored at the British Library, revealing Banks’s own cross-format interdisciplinary knowledge taxonomy in detail for the first time.
Banks wrote catalogues of her own collections and kept notes regarding provenance, many of which have been overlooked to date. This project will use these sources to rediscover the full extent and original arrangement, purpose and source of Banks’s prints, drawings, ephemera, books and manuscripts, focusing on those at the British Library. The student will explore Banks’ networks of knowledge, methods of collecting, network of contacts, and her strategies and systems for categorising her visual and textual materials. The project asks larger questions around the role of women collectors, knowledge practices, collecting history and scholarship, the emergence of (male) expertise, disciplinary norms and museological frameworks in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the relative status of visual and textual knowledge. While Joseph Banks’s collections as a whole and Sarah Sophia Banks’s collections beyond the Library have had sustained academic attention, her holdings at the Library remain largely underexplored. This project matches the recent full cataloguing of her collections at the Royal Mint and British Museum, facilitating cross-institutional research, and impacting practically upon reader access to and understanding of these materials and their provenance.
Banks organises her collections by subject and chronologically, notes the date and often the source of each item, quotes and cross-references other texts and authorities in inserted notes, and writes catalogues of her own collections. Research questions on these rich sources could include:
• How and when did Sarah Sophia Banks acquire her collections? What do her annotations reveal about her network and collecting practices in the 18th century? How do these names connect with the Banks collections beyond the Library?
• What knowledge systems and material ordering practices did she employ? How did she order and construct her unique assemblages? What does this tell us about gendered ways of structuring collections?
• How did her collecting constitute a form of ‘worldmaking’, particularly given her and her family’s social and global networks and perspectives?
• What is the evidence for Banks’s knowledge of other collections (in Britain or abroad)? How did this impact on her own practices?
• How did the nascent professionalism of male collecting and museology in her lifetime affect her collecting?
• Is she quoting from her own (or her brother’s) copies of works in her notes and cross-references? Can we reconstruct her library as a whole? How much survives?
• Can we reconstruct how the collection was physically placed, and what does this reveal about its history, value, visibility and use?
Banks’s social networks and intellectual enterprise have received scholarly attention from literary and art historical scholars. The project would complement existing scholarship by, for example, Edward Besly, 2023; Jan Bondeson, 2001; R.J. Eaglen, 2008; Catherine Eagleton, 2013, 2014; Arlene Leis, 2013, 2014; Anthony Pincott, 2004; Gillian Russell, 2015, 2018, 2020; and Kacie L. Wills and Frica Y. Hayes, 2020, 2024. But these and other scholars have focussed on the few ‘known’ print albums at the Library, mentioning in passing, or ignoring our wider holdings altogether. The project would extend this research to our wider Banks collections, connecting their collecting histories to broader social themes, issues of gender and historical knowledge and, specifically for the Library, our efforts to improve the visibility of our works on paper.
The student’s cataloguing will reveal Banks’s collections to all, with meaningful impact at the British Library and beyond. The history of collections has come to the fore of decolonial debates and activism in recent years and these issues are of important consideration in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Academic sector. There is now a rich scholarly and critical literature which the student will be encouraged to engage with, contributing to conversations both within and beyond the Library. Work on Joseph Banks is well developed and demonstrates the global connections of the family. His links to the slave trade are acknowledged by recent work at the British Library and at other institutions (including, for example, the Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). Following guidelines recently established by IDCoP, the Inclusive Description Community of Practice at the Library, the student will investigate Sarah Sophia Banks’s provenance network, recuperating a female collector’s collecting against the wider context of empire and social privilege which she inhabits. Overall, the project offers varied and hands-on, practical experience of identifying, securing, describing and researching prints, drawings, ephemera, books and manuscripts.
More information is available here. Pleae direct questions to the British Library Research Development Office – Postgraduate inbox, pgr@bl.uk, and Felicity Myrone, Lead Curator Western Prints and Drawings, Felicity.myrone@bl.uk.
British Library Co-Supervisors
Felicity Myrone (Lead Curator of Western Prints and Drawings)
Maddy Smith (Lead Curator, Printed Heritage 1600–1900)
Alice Marples (Research and Postgraduate Development Manager)
Enfilade 
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