Individual objects in our museums are visual reminders of US Progressive-era attitudes towards gender, race, and identity, a period marked by tensions between ideals of reform and progress and the reality of the lived experience of many in America at the turn of the last century. Clearly, objects collected during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been the subject of debate for decades. While discussions among museum staff and with community stakeholders bring these and similar themes to the table, unresolved issues remain.

Session attendees committed to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion - researchers, educators, and policy makers - are invited to join in conversation on questions including:

• What perspectives can today’s undergraduate and graduate students extract from museum archives collected during the decades surrounding the turn of the last century?
• What can students, at the time of this writing energized by pressing issues regarding social justice, contribute to ongoing debates about the relevance of museum objects to contemporary social issues?
• Can students’ encounters with these objects, informed by historical context, anticipate and guide future dialogues on themes including transparency, ethics, attribution, and ownership?

Roundtable panelists are Anna Dhody, Caroline Western, and Anne Ricculli. As Acting Co-Director and Curator of the Mütter Museum and Director of the Mütter Research Institute at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Anna Dhody strives to put the collection into a historic, cultural, and scientific context, and is committed to the respectful representation of every human specimen in the Museum. Caroline Western, Curator of Collections at Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, aims to reconstruct for students the reality of American inventors during the 19th Century. Patent applicants did not have to disclose their race or gender, a fact that now creates difficulty for researchers to understand the full extent of the history of invention in the United States. Anne Ricculli, Curator of the Guinness Collection of Mechanical Museum and Automata, Morris Museum (NJ) invites students to interrogate the ethnographic depictions of human figures at three distinct time intervals: purchased in the late Victorian era, displayed in a mid-twentieth century private residence, and encountered in the museum setting in the age of robotics and artificial intelligence. This roundtable panel is moderated by historian and theorist of the body and face Sharrona Pearl, Associate Professor of Medical Ethics, Drexel University.

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminded us to interrogate the processes through which history is crafted from archives: collecting, cataloging, retrieval/exhibiting, and finally, construction of narratives. We look forward to a dialogue about the process through which interpretive strategies based on museum collections and practices acquire added significance when students “flip the script” and raise critical questions about how, when, and why individuals and community members make the choices they do.