Papers by Science Museum Group Journal
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
Thomas Mougey reviews The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience by Samuel J Redman.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
Simon Werrett discusses the Leviathan and After: Celebration of the History of Science, the Field... more Simon Werrett discusses the Leviathan and After: Celebration of the History of Science, the Field and its Future event hosted by the Science Museum and UCL’s Department of Science and Technology Studies in May 2025, and explores why and how the book has made such an impact in the field since its publication in 1985.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
Oliver Betts (Research Lead, National Railway Museum) reflects on the opportunities for new resea... more Oliver Betts (Research Lead, National Railway Museum) reflects on the opportunities for new research opened up by significant museum anniversaries.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
This article reveals the transformational value of Indigenous partnership for understanding the s... more This article reveals the transformational value of Indigenous partnership for understanding the science stories within our collections. Indigenous objects are often poorly catalogued in the collection, with vague descriptions such as, ‘perhapes [sic] prepared by Canadian Indians’ belying provenance and worse, obscuring the scientific and technological contributions of Indigenous Nations. In this article, Hartman Deetz, a Wampanoag arts and education consultant and tribal citizen, and Milly Mulcahey-Knight, a white, non-Indigenous anthropologist and research assistant at the London Science Museum, collaboratively interpret two objects made of birchbark in the care of the Science Museum Group (SMG). The first is a collection of five pieces of maple sugar, stored in individual conical containers of twisted birchbark. The second is an intricately designed model birchbark canoe. Starting with vague catalogue descriptions, Hartman and Milly detail the use of the maple sugar as a medicinal plant, connected with other medicines and medical technologies in the collection. The model canoe is interpreted as a teaching tool for Ojibwe-style birchbark canoes which turned riverways into transport routes for trade and cultural exchange. This ingenious use of the flexible and waterproof birchbark also left its mark on London. As a central technology of the beaver trade, these canoes were profited off by London’s elite and even remembered in the architecture of Oxford Street.
The research described took place during the planning of an exhibition at the London Science Museum on Science and Technology in North America in the mid-1700s. Milly and Hartman joined the team as the curators transitioned from a two-year-long research stage into exhibition planning. Hartman acted as a paid independent cultural advisor. Milly was on a four-month placement funded by the White Rose Consortium as part of her PhD research into Indigenous and non-Indigenous partnerships in heritage work. In partnership they identified objects and interpreted Indigenous science stories, to enrich the exhibition and collections interpretations. Overall, this article demonstrates that collaborative interpretation with Indigenous experts not only adds detail to the SMG and Wellcome Collection catalogues but challenges the silencing of Indigenous contributions to science and technology.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
In 2022, the ashes of Preben Holger Larsen were repatriated to Denmark, and interred at the Minde... more In 2022, the ashes of Preben Holger Larsen were repatriated to Denmark, and interred at the Mindelunden Memorial Park on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Larsen was a member of the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation of Denmark during the Second World War, and for this was imprisoned at Neuengamme Concentration Camp in northern Germany, where he was killed in 1944. However, after the end of the war, Larsen was listed on a Memorial at Mindelunden for those Danish freedom fighters whose remains had never been found.
Larsen’s cremated remains had, in fact, been taken from Neuengamme by Frederick Murgatroyd, a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army Medical Corps, and brought back to the UK. After Murgatroyd’s death in the 1950s, the urn containing Larsen’s ashes, together with twenty photographs from Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen, was given to the former Wellcome Museum of Medical Science in London, and in 1982, loaned to the Science Museum with the rest of the Wellcome museum collection.
In this article, we explore how Larsen’s remains came to be in a museum collection, how they were rediscovered and their identity confirmed, and the efforts towards their repatriation. The ethical collections management of human remains in museums is a complex and evolving field, and repatriation is receiving significant attention across the sector. This is an unusual case, but one with important lessons in collections management, archival research, public access to museum documentation, and the review of human remains in museum collections.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
Developing from the principle of democratising collections, there is an increasing call to turn m... more Developing from the principle of democratising collections, there is an increasing call to turn museum open storage into places for visitors’ learning. Much of the existing literature has suggested that encountering huge collections without interpretation or guidance can be overwhelming for visitors (Dawes, 2016; Slater, 1995). However, an emerging counterargument suggests that open storage without curation empowers visitors to explore the area freely and enjoy unexpected encounters with objects within vast collections (Bond, 2018; Keene, 2005, Thiemeyer, 2017). Using a case study of the Open Store in the National Railway Museum (NRM), York, this paper examines the potential for embodied learning in open storage seen through the lens of contemplative wonder (Schinkel, 2017, 2020). It argues that contemplative wonder is an important learning tool with strong affective power and the ability to stimulate imagination. Using qualitative data gained from adult visitors through accompanied visits, personal mind maps and interviews, this article demonstrates that the distinctive characteristics of museum open storage can indeed evoke visitors’ contemplative wonder. The visit experience had strong affective power and stimulated visitors’ imaginations. The potential of contemplative wonder for learning is evident since it encouraged visitors to connect to their personal experiences, generate questions, and exhibit reasoning and expressing a view on world development. Interestingly, this study also found that in the setting of museum open storage, feelings of confusion and being overwhelmed were always found when visitors experienced contemplative wonder, leading to the conclusion that these two feelings are not necessarily hindrances to visitors’ learning as existing literature suggests.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
This paper reflects upon notions of value for research collaborations with differing stakeholder ... more This paper reflects upon notions of value for research collaborations with differing stakeholder agendas and suggests modes of working that could be useful to other academic/Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museum (GLAM) collaborations. It focuses on the Railway Work, Life & Death project, a collaboration between the National Railway Museum, University of Portsmouth and a number of other institutions. It demonstrates the benefits that meaningful, long-term collaboration can provide to those involved, and to wider stakeholder communities. It also considers some of the challenges of working with difficult pasts – in this case, accidents which killed and injured many tens of thousands of railway workers, and which run counter to popular perceptions of a ‘golden age’ of rail travel in Britain and Ireland. These tensions are noted and related to 2025’s Railway 200 celebration as both an opportunity and a challenge in terms of telling more diverse stories about the past.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
Glyn Morgan (Head of Collections and Principal Curator, Science Museum) reflects on museum practi... more Glyn Morgan (Head of Collections and Principal Curator, Science Museum) reflects on museum practice in the editorial for Issue 24 of the Science Museum Group Journal.
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
Dr Kierri Price reviews the Medieval Women: In Their Own Words exhibition at the British Library,... more Dr Kierri Price reviews the Medieval Women: In Their Own Words exhibition at the British Library, with interjections from four fellow medievalists to reflect the excitement of the exhibition. Dr Price’s interlocutors include Dr Diane Heath (medievalist and a guest editor of this issue of the journal), Professor Louise Wilkinson from the University of Lincoln (who was on the advisory panel for the exhibition), Dr Harriet Kersey (expert in noblewomen of the thirteenth century), and Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh (Principal Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Centre for Kent History and Heritage at Canterbury Christ Church University).
Science Museum Group Journal, 2025
Open Access paradigms have changed how academic scholarship is published and disseminated, creati... more Open Access paradigms have changed how academic scholarship is published and disseminated, creating a new model for how research is shared. But how do these paradigms map onto museum research? This question is particularly pertinent when larger numbers of funded research projects include, or are led by, museums. This article considers some of the affordances and challenges of using Open Access principles and technologies to make visible the multifaceted modes of research that take place in a museum setting. Using the Science Museum Group as a case study, it focuses on how repositories offer one means to make research conducted in museums more accessible, while also broadening definitions of what a research output is. With the focus hitherto more on images and collection items, here we expand into the realm of exhibition and gallery outputs – the content which museums produce to narrate their collections’ stories and engage audiences. Many of these outputs may have been designed to have an ephemeral, physical lifespan, but through platforms such as repositories they can gain a digital afterlife, serving a new purpose as learning resources, research data, or indeed a record of curatorial and museological practice. The article ultimately argues that Open Access principles can aid museums (and the wider GLAM sector) in their mission to be transparent organisations for wide-ranging audiences. 
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Papers by Science Museum Group Journal
The research described took place during the planning of an exhibition at the London Science Museum on Science and Technology in North America in the mid-1700s. Milly and Hartman joined the team as the curators transitioned from a two-year-long research stage into exhibition planning. Hartman acted as a paid independent cultural advisor. Milly was on a four-month placement funded by the White Rose Consortium as part of her PhD research into Indigenous and non-Indigenous partnerships in heritage work. In partnership they identified objects and interpreted Indigenous science stories, to enrich the exhibition and collections interpretations. Overall, this article demonstrates that collaborative interpretation with Indigenous experts not only adds detail to the SMG and Wellcome Collection catalogues but challenges the silencing of Indigenous contributions to science and technology.
Larsen’s cremated remains had, in fact, been taken from Neuengamme by Frederick Murgatroyd, a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army Medical Corps, and brought back to the UK. After Murgatroyd’s death in the 1950s, the urn containing Larsen’s ashes, together with twenty photographs from Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen, was given to the former Wellcome Museum of Medical Science in London, and in 1982, loaned to the Science Museum with the rest of the Wellcome museum collection.
In this article, we explore how Larsen’s remains came to be in a museum collection, how they were rediscovered and their identity confirmed, and the efforts towards their repatriation. The ethical collections management of human remains in museums is a complex and evolving field, and repatriation is receiving significant attention across the sector. This is an unusual case, but one with important lessons in collections management, archival research, public access to museum documentation, and the review of human remains in museum collections.