MUSEUM SCHOLARSHIP & MATERIAL CULTURE
A unique experience for University of Maryland scholars to learn from local and national museum professionals
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The Certificate Program in Museum Scholarship and Material Culture is co-directed by Mary Alexander and Ricardo L. Punzalan.
3381 Stephenson Place, NW
alexander_schou@msn.com
Mary Alexander has worked in and for Washington area history museums for the past four decades. She has been a museum educator, assistant director, leader of the Common Agenda for History Museums project for the American Association for State and Local History, and most recently administrator of the Museum Assistance Program of the Maryland Historical Trust (Maryland's State Historic Preservation Office). She co-authored with George Hein, Museums: Places of Learning (1998) and in 2008 revised her father's museum studies textbook, Museums in Motion: The History and Functions of Museums. Mary holds a BA in History from Beloit College, and an MA in Education from the University of Connecticut.
Dr. Ricardo L. Punzalan
College of Information Studies
Hornbake 0216B
punzalan@umd.edu
Dr. Ricardo L. Punzalan is assistant professor of archives and digital curation at the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park. In 2016, he received an early-career grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study and develop strategies to assess the impact of access to digitized ethnographic archives for academic and Indigenous community users. He also examines 'virtual reunification' as a strategy to provide integrated access to dispersed ethnographic archival images online. He leads a team of postdoctoral scholars and masters' fellows to enhance agricultural data curation efforts at the U.S. National Agricultural Library. He holds a Ph.D. in Information as well as graduate certificates in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. He previously taught on the faculty of the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies. His articles have been published in leading library and information science and archives journals, including the Library Quarterly, American Archivist, Archivaria, and Archival Science. In 2012, he received the Hugh A. Taylor Prize from the Association of Canadian Archivists for his co-authored article in Archivaria on users and uses of digitized photographic archives.
Diana Marsh
Adjunct Professor
Department of Anthropology
1111 Woods Hall
4302 Chapel Lane
Diana Marsh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives (NAA). Her work focuses on how changing technologies, cultures, and values affect the communication of knowledge in heritage institutions. Her current research focuses on access to anthropological archives and the circulation of digitized ethnographic collections in Native communities.
From 2015–2017, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society where she curated exhibitions drawing primarily on archival collections (Curious Revolutionaries: The Peales of Philadelphia, April–December 2017 and Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America, April–December 2016). In 2014–2015, she was a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in Museum Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where she taught courses in museology and heritage. She completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UBC, where she conducted an ethnography of exhibition planning and the renovation of the National Museum of Natural History's fossil hall. She has an MPhil in Social Anthropology with a Museums and Heritage focus from the University of Cambridge and a BFA in Visual Arts and Photography from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work has been published in Journal of Material Culture, Museum Anthropology, Practicing Anthropology, Archivaria, and Archival Science. Her book, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls, was recently published with Berghahn Books Museum and Collections Series.