Books by Helen Rees Leahy

MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGEMuseum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced.Organized around three themes--Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory--the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

An account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century onwards. It discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability.