Building the Dream - by Lonnie Bunch

Lonnie Bunch will be speaking about the challenge building the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC as a lens through which to focus on the way race is explored but not really examined in American museums.

Bio

As the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Lonnie Bunch promotes the museum’s mission to help audiences see African American history as American and human history. One of the recent exhibits, ‘Through the African American Lens: Selections from the Permanent Collection’, opened on 8 May 2018. In addition, the museum’s travelling exhibition, ‘Changing America’, will be exhibited at 50 venues across the US during 2018. Lonnie Bunch also established the programme ‘Save Our African American Treasures’ featuring day-long workshops where participants work with conservation specialists and historians to learn to identify and preserve items of historical value.

Before his July 2005 appointment as Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Bunch served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society (2001–2005). A prolific and widely published author, Lonnie Bunch has written on topics ranging from the black military experience, the American presidency and all-black towns in the American West to diversity in museum management and the impact of funding and politics on American museums. In 2010, he published the award-winning book, Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on Race, History and Museums. In 2017, he authored for the World Economic Forum in Davos Agenda (blog), ‘America, Slavery and how Museums can help to heal Fractured Societies’. Lectures and presentations to museum professionals and scholars have taken him to major cities in the United States and many nations abroad, including Australia, China, Ghana, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Sweden and the UK.

Bunch received undergraduate and graduate degrees from The American University in Washington, D.C. in African American and American history. In 2017, Bunch was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received honorary doctorates from universities, including Princeton University, Brown University, Dominican University, Georgetown, Roosevelt University, Rutgers University and his alma mater, American University.

This lecture is chaired by Professor Tamar Garb (Director of the IAS) and closing remarks and thanks will be given by David Lammy (Member of Parliament for Tottenham).

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