Debbie Challis
Debbie Challis is Events Producer at the Portico Library in Manchester, a membership library with 25,000 books mainly from the 19thC. The was Education and Outreach Officer at LSE Library, working with their special collection and archives (principally relating to politics, equality activism and social history). She has worked in Visitor Services and Learning & Access in museums, including English Heritage, Royal Museums Greenwich, and the National Portrait Gallery, for almost twenty years. She was Public Programmer at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL where she organised public events, community based exhibitions and academic impact activity 2007 - 17. She has also curated content for the BBC Online Archive and written learning resources for the UK Film Council, Open University and the National Portrait Gallery.
Her academic research is mainly on the history of museums and archaeology in the nineteenth century. She has written on museums, the reception of the past and the construction of racial theory; including books Archaeology of Race. The Eugenic Thinking of Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton (2013) and From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus. British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880 (2008). Other recent publications include 'Queering Display: LGBT History and the Ancient World in Museums', Rebecca Langlands and Kate Fischer (eds). Sex, Knowledge and Receptions of the Past (2015), 'What's in a Face? Mummy Portrait Panels and Identity in Museum Display', William Carruthers (2014) (ed.) Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, Routledge, Taylor and Francis and (2013) 'Creating Typecasts: exhibiting eugenic ideas from the past today', Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, Vol. 28, No. 1: 15-33.
Her academic research is mainly on the history of museums and archaeology in the nineteenth century. She has written on museums, the reception of the past and the construction of racial theory; including books Archaeology of Race. The Eugenic Thinking of Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton (2013) and From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus. British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880 (2008). Other recent publications include 'Queering Display: LGBT History and the Ancient World in Museums', Rebecca Langlands and Kate Fischer (eds). Sex, Knowledge and Receptions of the Past (2015), 'What's in a Face? Mummy Portrait Panels and Identity in Museum Display', William Carruthers (2014) (ed.) Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, Routledge, Taylor and Francis and (2013) 'Creating Typecasts: exhibiting eugenic ideas from the past today', Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, Vol. 28, No. 1: 15-33.
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Archaeology of Race draws on archives and objects from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Galton collection at UCL. These collections are used to explore anti-Semitism, skull collecting, New Race theory and physiognomy. These collections give insight into the relationship between Galton and Petrie and place their ideas in historical context.
Table Of Contents
Foreword by Natasha McEnroe, former Curator of the Galton Collection and Director of the Florence Nightingale Museum.
Introduction
Races and Men Before the 1860s
Galton and Genius
Fitting Aesthetics
Photographing Races from Antiquity
Greek Art, Greek Faces?
Peopling the Old Testament
Akhenaten's Heredity
The New Ancient Race
Flinders Petrie and Edwardian Politics
Memphis Heads
Afterword by Kathleen Sheppard, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Appendices
Papers
This paper discusses the impact of ideas about the historical and racial origins of the Holy Family that are captured in the painting Anno Domini or the Flight into Egypt (1883/4) by Edwin Longsden Long. Anno Domini fits into a wider 19th-century popular visual and literary narrative around Egypt and its ancient and biblical past. This general narrative, and its racial constructions, has been explored within reception theory and art history, but often overlooked in histories of archaeology and Egyptology. This paper unpacks how Anno Domini fits into a well-known orientalist way of seeing Egypt but also reflects ideas about race that were prevalent in archaeology and other newly established scientific disciplines at the time. The construction of the Virgin Mary and Christ child as White Europeans in Anno Domini both reflects and had an impact on constructions of race in Britain and on ancient (and modern) peoples in the Holy Land and Egypt in the late nineteenth century.
These constructions fed the growing use of scientific terminology to give such racist imagery authority, as found in A. H. Sayce's ‘Sunday school book’ The Races of the Old Testament (1891). Sayce’s popular book used photographs taken by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1887 of different 'racial types' from Egyptian monuments. Anno Domini vividly illustrates the preoccupation with race and identity found in archaeological interpretations of and motivations for recording material culture from ancient Egypt. This paper illustrates how art, archaeology, orientalism and racial theory fused and fed each other.
Sex: how should we do it, when should we do it, and with whom? How should we talk about and represent sex, what social institutions should regulate it, and what are other people doing? Throughout history human beings have searched for answers to such questions by turning to the past, whether through archaeological studies of prehistoric sexual behaviour, by reading Casanova's memoirs, or as modern visitors on the British Museum LGBT trail.
Paper
Considers the approach of museums to LGBT History, partiularly in the ancient world and with cultural material from antiquity. It starts and finishes with an account of relevant objects and audience development activities in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL. Uncorrected Proof uploaded.
programme around Typecast: Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton at the Petrie
Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London during 2011.
Typecast explored ideas around race and archaeology, heredity and eugenics in
the early twentieth century. After independent consultation, I decided to write
about the exhibition from my own perspective and publicly identify myself as
curator. As part of my own response, I drew parallels with contemporary events
and issues today. This paper incorporates a discussion of:
the implications of using my personal identity; how situations could have
been handled differently,
the myth of neutrality, especially around contentious issues, within
museum and media institutions,
anonymous responses from visitors and identified critical voices; ethical
responsibility in dealing with provocative issues,
how wider discussion in a public realm was facilitated.
Archaeology of Race draws on archives and objects from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Galton collection at UCL. These collections are used to explore anti-Semitism, skull collecting, New Race theory and physiognomy. These collections give insight into the relationship between Galton and Petrie and place their ideas in historical context.
Table Of Contents
Foreword by Natasha McEnroe, former Curator of the Galton Collection and Director of the Florence Nightingale Museum.
Introduction
Races and Men Before the 1860s
Galton and Genius
Fitting Aesthetics
Photographing Races from Antiquity
Greek Art, Greek Faces?
Peopling the Old Testament
Akhenaten's Heredity
The New Ancient Race
Flinders Petrie and Edwardian Politics
Memphis Heads
Afterword by Kathleen Sheppard, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Appendices
This paper discusses the impact of ideas about the historical and racial origins of the Holy Family that are captured in the painting Anno Domini or the Flight into Egypt (1883/4) by Edwin Longsden Long. Anno Domini fits into a wider 19th-century popular visual and literary narrative around Egypt and its ancient and biblical past. This general narrative, and its racial constructions, has been explored within reception theory and art history, but often overlooked in histories of archaeology and Egyptology. This paper unpacks how Anno Domini fits into a well-known orientalist way of seeing Egypt but also reflects ideas about race that were prevalent in archaeology and other newly established scientific disciplines at the time. The construction of the Virgin Mary and Christ child as White Europeans in Anno Domini both reflects and had an impact on constructions of race in Britain and on ancient (and modern) peoples in the Holy Land and Egypt in the late nineteenth century.
These constructions fed the growing use of scientific terminology to give such racist imagery authority, as found in A. H. Sayce's ‘Sunday school book’ The Races of the Old Testament (1891). Sayce’s popular book used photographs taken by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1887 of different 'racial types' from Egyptian monuments. Anno Domini vividly illustrates the preoccupation with race and identity found in archaeological interpretations of and motivations for recording material culture from ancient Egypt. This paper illustrates how art, archaeology, orientalism and racial theory fused and fed each other.
Sex: how should we do it, when should we do it, and with whom? How should we talk about and represent sex, what social institutions should regulate it, and what are other people doing? Throughout history human beings have searched for answers to such questions by turning to the past, whether through archaeological studies of prehistoric sexual behaviour, by reading Casanova's memoirs, or as modern visitors on the British Museum LGBT trail.
Paper
Considers the approach of museums to LGBT History, partiularly in the ancient world and with cultural material from antiquity. It starts and finishes with an account of relevant objects and audience development activities in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL. Uncorrected Proof uploaded.
programme around Typecast: Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton at the Petrie
Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London during 2011.
Typecast explored ideas around race and archaeology, heredity and eugenics in
the early twentieth century. After independent consultation, I decided to write
about the exhibition from my own perspective and publicly identify myself as
curator. As part of my own response, I drew parallels with contemporary events
and issues today. This paper incorporates a discussion of:
the implications of using my personal identity; how situations could have
been handled differently,
the myth of neutrality, especially around contentious issues, within
museum and media institutions,
anonymous responses from visitors and identified critical voices; ethical
responsibility in dealing with provocative issues,
how wider discussion in a public realm was facilitated.
The Greek Miracle. Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy. The Fifth Century BC exhibition was held at National Gallery of America in Washington DC and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1992 to 1993. The Birth of Democracy: An Exhibition Celebrating the 2500th Anniversary of Democracy was held at the Gennadius Library in Athens and the National Archives, Washington DC in 1993. This case study looks at the reception of ancient Athens and democracy in these exhibitions and examines the issues that were raised for scholars and museum professionals. The project can be (and has been) used by students and tutors working in heritage, archaeology and museum studies as well as on the reception of the classical world. For those who are coming fresh to the subject, a very brief summary of the scholarly, museum and political background to the exhibitions is provided. An additional overview of other relevant events commemorating ‘Democracy 2,500' is also included.
This study was commissioned and first published online in 2008. Events that have happened since, such as the opening of the Acropolis Museum in Athens and the economic meltdown and its impact on Greece, should be considered when considering the questions that are asked throughout the study around future pertinent research.