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#AskACurator day on 16 September
On 16 September 2020, we’ll be taking part in #AskACurator day on Twitter.
It’s your chance to put our curators on the spot and ask the questions you’ve always wanted to know: Why do we have a jar of moles in the Grant Museum of Zoology? Did rival students really play football with Jeremy Bentham’s preserved head?
We’ve lined up four of our curators for you to chat to throughout the day.
10am – 11am
Grant Museum of Zoology on Twitter
Tannis Davidson, Curator of the Grant Museum of Zoology
From unearthing the dismembered arms of mummies at archaeological digs in Egypt to searching for fossils in Bavaria, Tannis has a rich history in researching and examining the stories of the once living. As the curator of the Grant Museum, Tannis cares for one of the oldest natural history collections in the UK including visitor favourites such as the famous glass jar of moles, the wall of 4,000 mice skeletons and the back lit cave of microscope slides known as the Micrarium. She also appeared on BBC’s QI talking about the rarest skeleton in the world – the museum’s quagga specimen (an extinct subspecies of zebra).
Follow the Grant Museum on Twitter
11am – 12 midday
Petrie Museum on Twitter
Dr. Anna Garnett, Curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology
Anna has worked for over a decade in Egypt and Sudan on archaeological fieldwork projects and has also spent years working with different ancient Egyptian museum collections around the UK. She is passionate about ancient Egyptian pottery and sculpture, the material culture of ancient and modern Sudan, the history of British Egyptology and object and archive-based teaching. Anna now looks after over 80,000 artefacts in the Petrie Museum, including the world’s oldest-known piece of clothing, an array of ancient pots which preserve their maker’s fingerprints, and an extraordinary group of small funerary figurines called shabtis.
Follow the Petrie Museum on Twitter
1pm – 2pm
UCL Culture on Twitter
Hannah Cornish, Science Curator
Hannah has worked at some of the UK’s most exciting cultural institutions, including the Natural History Museum, the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons and of course UCL’s own Grant Museum, Science Collections and Pathology Museum. Hannah can talk to you about UCL’s Science Collections which cover two centuries of scientific research at UCL and include Nobel Prize-winning equipment and one of the world’s first medical x-ray images. She can also reveal some of the mysteries around Jeremy Bentham’s famous Auto-icon and UCL’s Pathology Museum (a medical museum that is not for the faint hearted).
Follow UCL Culture on Twitter
2pm – 3pm
UCL Culture on Twitter
Subhadra Das, Curator of UCL Science and Pathology Collections
Subhadra is a writer, broadcaster, comedian and museum curator at UCL Culture. Her main area of research is the history of science and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically the history of eugenics and scientific racism. Over the last few years, Subhadra has curated a number of exhibitions at UCL, showcasing critical approaches to displaying human remains, the history and philosophy of medicine, eugenics at UCL and the colonial origins of our natural history collections. She’s here to tell you about why it’s important not to believe everything you read, especially if it’s about Jeremy Bentham.
Follow UCL Culture on Twitter
