Lianne McTavish

University of Alberta, Art and Design, Faculty Member

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My new book, Voluntary Detours: Small Town and Rural Museums in Alberta, is forthcoming. This single-authored monograph features the key themes⸺place, land, colonization, identity, mobility, heritage, nostalgia, childhood, play, transformation, loss⸺addressed in and by the small town and rural museums in the province. The book draws on analyses of the different places encountered, exhibitions on display, and discussions with staff members, including semi-structured interviews, to examine, among other issues, how the trip to small town and rural museums is a crucial part of the visit, how rural museums critically reshape historical understandings of museums, how tourists and local residents understand small town and rural museums differently, how such museums negotiate conceptions of the “rural” while representing the colonial settler history of the province, and how they convey beliefs about land ownership and the appropriate use of natural resources.My previous book, Feminist Figure Girl, was published by SUNY Press in 2015. Please check out my blog at feministfiguregirl.com. I have recently published an account of how early modern women treated people with intestinal worms, among other new publications!
Address: Department of Art and Design
3-98 Fine Arts Building
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB Canada
T6G 2C9

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Pilar Diez del Corral Corredoira

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Andromache Gazi

Panteion University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Romy Golan

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Stergios Doumouchtsis

Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust

Catherine Mills

Monash University

Giampaolo Salice

Università degli Studi di Cagliari

Christiane Gruber

University of Michigan

Felicity Bodenstein

Sorbonne Université

Kathryn Rudy

University of St Andrews

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RACAR, revue d'art canadienne, Canadian art review, 1996

Tous droits réservés © UAAC-AAUC (University Art Association of Canada | Association d'art des un... more Tous droits réservés © UAAC-AAUC (University Art Association of Canada | Association d'art des universités du Canada), 1998 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de

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5. Concealing Spectacles: Childbirth and Visuality in Early Modern France

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2008

FLUX: responding to head and neck cancer

Canadian Medical Association Journal, Jan 20, 2019

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Introduction: The Impossible Museum

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2012

Chapter Five. Gendered Professionals: Debating the Ideal Museum Worker during the 1930s and 1940s

Daston, Lorraine, ed. 2004. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science

Material Culture Review / Revue de la culture matérielle, Jun 6, 2006

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The Rewards of Professionalization Alice Lusk Webster and the New Brunswick Museum, 1933–53¹

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Apr 11, 2012

Figuring the hand: portraits of artists and surgeons in seventeenth-century France

Estudios de arte y estética, 1999

Middle of nowhere: contesting rural heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum

International Journal of Heritage Studies, Mar 6, 2017

Abstract The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta, Canada, is a rural museum lo... more Abstract The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta, Canada, is a rural museum located in a relatively isolated hamlet of less than 200 people. Inside the museum, small diorama boxes feature taxidermied gophers dressed in tiny clothing and posed as townspeople dining in restaurants, shooting pool and chatting at a beauty parlour, among other activities. Drawing on methods stemming from critical museum theory, critical rural studies and critical heritage studies, this article analyzes the ways in which both local residents and visitors from outside the region understand the museum, considering why it is indeed world famous, attracting over 5000 international tourists each year. It argues that the Gopher Hole Museum succeeds in part because its organisers are active agents who take pride in the museum without attempting to refute the sometimes negative responses to it, or control the ways in which outsiders interpret it. The museum in Torrington is a complex ‘open text’ that both employs and critiques the conventional methods used in natural history and heritage museums to offer multiple narratives about childhood, heritage and rural life, addressing local people as well as tourists.

Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture

American Review of Canadian Studies, Jan 2, 2015

attaining the general social right to participate in now commonplace public and family friendly A... more attaining the general social right to participate in now commonplace public and family friendly American activities involving alcohol, such as sporting event “tailgate” parties). Following on the moralistic tradition of Canada the Good, the current Harper government refuses to allow any “progressive” legal reforms regarding marijuana use, asserts the questionable claim of being able to “abolish” vices such as prostitution through newly drafted coercive legislation, and argues that social science disciplines such as sociology are of no value in dealing with various criminal issues. Despite these trends, and the Harper government’s anti-sociological stances, Martel has shown that when it comes to the moral question of vice’s role in Canadian people’s lives, history definitely does matter.

Alexandra Flood : Gem Hour

This richly illustrated catalogue demonstrates how certain properties related to the beauty of je... more

Defining the Modern Museum

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2012

The entry point of Defining the Modern Museum is the claim that the modern museum, a synecdoche o... more The entry point of Defining the Modern Museum is the claim that the modern museum, a synecdoche of the intellectual and physical World (singular and capitalized), has been a powerful yet mythical idea, impossible to be materially accomplished. Rather than focusing on theoretical – therefore ideal – paradigms of what a museum should be, Lianne McTavish’s goal is to apply critical theory to the (historically traceable) practices of one institution in particular: the New Brunswick Museum (NBM), the oldest continuing museum in Canada. Throughout the volume, the writer criticizes the abundance of investigations that use her same theoretical scope, yet to ultimately prove the democratic success of certain contemporary museum models, or the commodification and dissolution of this type of institution into mere massive spectacle. She warns readers that her endeavor in Defining the Modern Museum is to identify continuities and contradictions rather than offer a definite diagnosis of this institution or museums at large.

The Torrington Gopher Hole Museum: A Model Institution

University of British Columbia Press eBooks, Mar 7, 2016

Reproduction, c. 1500–1750

Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015

Although Naples was one of Europe's largest cities (after London and Paris), studies of the manag... more Although Naples was one of Europe's largest cities (after London and Paris), studies of the management of its water supply during the early modern period are sorely lacking, despite growing interest in the subject at both an Italian and European level. Naples was perhaps unique in relying on a vast and tortuous underground network of reservoirs, cisterns, channels and conduits, accessed by well shafts, all fed by an ancient aqueduct. The present study outlines and evaluates the Neapolitan water supply as it existed in the period, analysing the archival records of the municipal tribunal responsible for the city's infrastructure, the 'Tribunale della Fortificazione, Acqua e Mattonata', and its various 'Appuntamenti' (proposals), 'Conclusioni' (decisions) and edicts. This is interwoven with reference to pertinent printed accounts, from contemporary guide books to medical regimens and health manuals. We examine both water quantity, in terms of availability and accessibility (by looking at the structure and its management, and the technicians responsible for its maintenance) and water quality (by looking at contemporary attitudes and perceptions). In the process we are able to question the widespread view of early modern Naples as chaotic and uncontrolled, governed by a weak public authority, as well as widely held assumptions about the "inertia" of the pre-modern hydro-social system more generally.

Feminist Figure Girl: Look Hot While You Fight the Patriarchy (Feb 2015 SUNY Press)

Defining the Modern Museum

Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France

feministfiguregirl.com

Reproducing Poussin

RACAR, revue d'art canadienne, Canadian art review, 1996

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5. Concealing Spectacles: Childbirth and Visuality in Early Modern France

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Jan 31, 2008

FLUX: responding to head and neck cancer

Canadian Medical Association Journal, Jan 20, 2019

Download

Introduction: The Impossible Museum

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2012

Chapter Five. Gendered Professionals: Debating the Ideal Museum Worker during the 1930s and 1940s

Daston, Lorraine, ed. 2004. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science

Material Culture Review / Revue de la culture matérielle, Jun 6, 2006

Download

The Rewards of Professionalization Alice Lusk Webster and the New Brunswick Museum, 1933–53¹

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Apr 11, 2012

Figuring the hand: portraits of artists and surgeons in seventeenth-century France

Estudios de arte y estética, 1999

Middle of nowhere: contesting rural heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum

International Journal of Heritage Studies, Mar 6, 2017

Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture

American Review of Canadian Studies, Jan 2, 2015

Alexandra Flood : Gem Hour

This richly illustrated catalogue demonstrates how certain properties related to the beauty of je... more

Defining the Modern Museum

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2012

The Torrington Gopher Hole Museum: A Model Institution

University of British Columbia Press eBooks, Mar 7, 2016

Reproduction, c. 1500–1750

Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015

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Voluntary Detours

Chapter One. Exchanging Values in the Nineteenth- Century Museum Marketplace

Eve Keller. Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England. xi + 248 pp., figs., bibl., index. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. $30 (paper)

Isis, Mar 1, 2008

Keller proposes to draw lines of comparison between recent neuroscientific discoveries about the ... more Keller proposes to draw lines of comparison between recent neuroscientific discoveries about the biological origins of subjecthood (the posthuman) and early modern, primarily Galenic conceptions (the premodern), arguing that these periods' constructions of the body and the self are united in their contrast to a humanist-era ethos of thought, the period which they both straddle. Similar to posthumanism's characteristic tenets of "embodiment, embeddedness, and distributed function" (20), Galenic science also construes the whole body (and the psyche) as essentially constituted by its environment and the discrete operations of its organs. As is frequently said of the humoral economy, if one truly is what one eats, then no clear delineation between self and environment exists, much the same way that boundaries between person and machine have begun to efface. The premodern model of physiology thus has "some level of continuity" ( ) with what we might perceive as the more radical innovations of neuroscience and the related branch of neurophilosophy that explain personhood and mental capacities as "materially made, emerg[ing] from widely distributed neural networks, and function in fully embedded connection with their environments" (25): plus ça change. Given Generating Bodies' publication in a series focused on science and culture, it explores predominantly early modern medical texts -anatomies, gynecological, obstetrical, and lay advice manuals -and often reads them for their

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Cinq Livres, de la mani&egrave;re de nourrir et gouverner les enfans d&egrave;s leur naissance (review)

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2006

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Lynn M. Morgan. Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos. xvii + 310 pp., illus., bibl., indexes. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009. $21.95 (paper)

Isis, Jun 1, 2010

Katharine Park. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York : Zone Books, 2006. 418 pp. index. illus. bibl. $36.95. ISBN: 1-890951-67-6

Renaissance Quarterly, 2007

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Lianne McTavish

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