The dead curator: Education and the rise of bureaucratic authority in natural history museums, 1870–1915

Abstract

ABSTRACT The dismantling of the Jenks Museum of Natural History at Brown University illustrates a shift from charismatic to bureaucratic authority in museums and its implications for museum education. J.W.P. Jenks, the museum’s founder and curator, died in 1894. Without Jenks’s constant effort on behalf of the museum, his collection deteriorated. Reacting against cabinet displays like those of the Jenks Museum, progressive ‘museum men’ like Brown alumnus Hermon Carey Bumpus developed new, de-personalised approaches to specimen-based museum education, including exhibitions and detailed object labels. At the American Museum of Natural History, these modes routinised interpretation for large urban audiences. At the same time, staff members in bureaucratic museums became more interchangeable. As museums expanded according to corporate and bureaucratic principles, the personalised, idiosyncratic interactions offered by educators like Jenks gave way to more systematized experiences that did not depend upon particular individuals to function.