Description:

Creating Careers in Public Institutions

Zoom link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98416645940

(No pre-registration necessary)

A career diversity event with Livia Alexander (ArteEast), Matti Bunzl (Director of Wien Museum), and Michelle Wilkinson (National Museum of African American History and Culture).

Please join us for a dynamic gathering of scholars to consider what it means to work publically.

The Kaplan Humanities Institute will host a lively discussion and Q&A with Livia Alexander, Matti Bunzl, and Michelle Wilkinson—scholars who successfully pivoted from academia to forge rewarding careers in public institutions (and still maintain a "foot" in the academy). You’ll learn ways to think about linking your work and interests to thrive in jobs with potential to shape broader publics.

Presented by the Public Humanities Graduate Research Workshop of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

About the speakers

Livia Alexander is a New York-based curator, writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Visual Cultures at Montclair State University. Her work focuses on examining the relationship between art infrastructure, artistic production, and urbanity. She has curated and produced numerous art and film programs and exhibitions, and showcased at MoMA New York, Tate Modern, Sharjah Art Foundation, and The Film Society of Lincoln Center. She is the co-founder of ArteEast, a global platform for promoting the arts of the Middle East, which she directed from 2003-2013. Her award-winning scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Anthropology, Framework, MERIP, and as book chapters and catalog essays. She regularly contributes to Hyperallergic, Art Africa, and Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia.

Matti Bunzl is Director of the Wien Museum, Vienna’s municipal museum. Before taking up this position, he was Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois (1998-2014) and Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival (2010-2014). A scholar of Vienna and Central Europe’s history and culture as well as the institution of the modern museum, Bunzl is the author of three books: Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (University of California Press, 2004); Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Prickly Paradigm Press/University of Chicago Press, 2007); and In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Michelle Joan Wilkinson is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), where she works on projects related to contemporary black life. She is the co-curator of two inaugural exhibitions at the NMAAHC: A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond and A Century in the Making: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Wilkinson is also developing the museum’s collections in architecture and design. From 1999-2002, Wilkinson was an assistant professor of African American, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean literature at Bard College in New York. In 2002, Wilkinson entered the museum field seeking to fulfill her passion for the arts, writing, scholarly research, and public engagement. She has worked on exhibitions, publications, and public programs for the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and at the Studio Museum in Harlem where she held the position of Editor and Library Coordinator.