CESTA Seminar | Gisch & Parker "Museums, Media, and Memory in South Africa"

Over the past 200 years an enormous wealth and variety of museums has developed in South Africa. Many have functioned as agents of colonization and nationalism, and been charged with materializing fraught political and cultural imperatives. When viewed in this light, such museums offer compelling microhistories of South Africa. While several museums reflect new developments, others have struggled to adapt to societal change. This presentation details prospects and challenges in developing a digital database of South African museums. What do the concepts of heritage and public history mean in relation to museums, some 24 years after the demise of apartheid? Do digital media offer new possibilities of curation, place-making and pedagogy?

Dillon Gisch is an MA candidate in Anthropology and a PhD candidate in Classical Archaeology at Stanford. He previously studied Art History and Classical Studies at the University of Washington and then worked as the Director of Antique and Modern Works on Paper at Davidson Galleries in Seattle. His dissertation examines the materiality of serial and replicated ancient Roman images of Venus and how ancient Roman as well as post-antique persons have perceived them.

Grant Parker is Associate Professor and Chair of Classics and Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar at Stanford. He first studied at the University of Cape Town and his first teaching position was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Among his publications are The Agony of Asar: A Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, J. E. J. Capitein, 1717-47 (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001) and, as editor, South Africa, Greece, Rome: Classical Confrontations (Cambridge UP, 2017).