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Engaging with Black Bloomsbury
By Kevin Guyan ‘Life Painting’, Slade School of Fine Art. George Konig, Keystone Press Agency. The idea of Bloomsbury is as much a product of the mind as it is a geographical location. Like Soho,...
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A[got]chu! Surviving the Flu
As the temperature drops and the wind blows harshly through the wind tunnels of the Tube, it genuinely feels like winter in London! When visitors arrive in the UCL museums blowing their noses and...
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Public engagement – an essential experience for the PhD student
Elephant Heart in the Grant Museum With 2013 now a thing of the past, I find myself reflecting on my progress over the last 12 months, which have taken me from fledgling PhD student to recently...
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Engaging in an Art Museum: Engagement Reflection
For most visitors to an art museum, there is an unwritten code of conduct that involves silence and whispers when appropriate. As a Researcher in Museums in UCL’s Art Museum, my job is to engage with...
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Question of the Week: How did men in antiquity shave?
By Felicity Winkley A visitor to the Petrie Museum recently asked me how the Egyptian working class men would have shaved. There are various razors in the Petrie collection, including UC40657, a...
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Question(s) of the Week: What is a toilet spoon and did you kill that
It’s been almost two years since I began working in UCL’s three public museums as a student engager and in that time I’ve been asked a lot of amusing questions, ranging from “did you kill that?” (most...
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Announcing Our Next Event, Movement
Movement: An Interdisciplinary Experience Friday, May 23; 18:30-20:00 UCL Art Museum & Other Spaces Movement: through time and space, across landscapes, inside our bodies. Join the Student...
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Question of the week: Do other animals have belly buttons?
by Stacy Hackner This question was thrown at me at the end of a conversation about juvenile bone growth, and I was completely blindsided. I know my cat definitely has a bump in the place his navel...
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Question of the Week: Do boys and girls enjoy different museum exhibits/items?
by Stacy Hackner This is actually a more complicated question than one would think, especially considering the recent controversies regarding “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” toys, the...
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Question of the Week: How do sharks hear?
by Stacy Hackner “Sharks have eyes and mouths, and we hear all about their ability to smell blood. How do they hear?” Once again, a visitor had me stumped. Despite their having only tiny holes for...
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The Power of the Image – Museum Engaging and Visual Sources
By Kevin Guyan In the first of two blog posts exploring Student Engagers’ experiences of using images when sharing research in museums, Kevin Guyan discusses the enthusiasm he has experienced and the...
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Question of the Week: What is Pelvimetry?
Last Saturday I was engaging at the Grant Museum of Zoology where I started talking with two visitors about the history of science. As a Victorian historian, my doctoral research specifically looks at...
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Question of the Week: Why is brain coral shaped like a brain?
By Ruth Blackburn The aptly named brain coral is a dome-shaped member of the family Faviidae which has distinct sinuous valleys (that’s the wibbly ridgey bits that look like the surface of a brain)....
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Question of the Week: What is the meaning of that funny loop-headed cross...
By Felicity Winkley UC6636: Limestone relieffrom Lahun with a god holdingan ankh (12th dynasty) Two American tourists who visited the Petrie last week spotted a pattern amongst the architectural...
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Looking back on ‘Blockages in the System’: a reflective comment on working...
By Kevin Guyan and Ruth Blackburn On the evening of Friday 23 May we presented ‘Blockages in the system: health research in postwar Britain’ to an audience of around 30 people in UCL’s...
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Question of the Week: When did the tradition for Grave Goods stop?
By Felicity Winkley Last week I had an interesting discussion with a visitor to the Petrie museum about grave goods. The shelves of the museum’s cases are lined with an impressive quantity of grave...
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Beyond the PhD: Public Engagement and Employment
By Kevin Guyan I write this blog post as a break from PhD research and the task of looking for part time employment. My mind is fast becoming foggy from the endless administration loop of locating a...
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Question of the Week: How tall were ancient Egyptians?
This was the first question I was asked on the first day in my new role as a Student Engager in the Petrie Museum. The visitor in the Petrie came up with this when he was looking at some of the...
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Question of the Week: Can we build a brain in the lab?
While working at the Grant museum of Zoology the other day, I encountered a lovely group of teenagers that started asking me questions about the museum. As we engagers do, I automatically started...
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Question of the week: What do captive tigers die from?
Recently I had a chat about tigers with a young visitor at the Grant Museum. As you might know, in early 2015 it was reported that India’s tiger population has increased by 30 per cent from 1,706...
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