I have been working at a new job for over a year now, so the job isn’t that “new” anymore, but I never got around to adjust my online profiles accordingly, so here goes:

I now serve as curator for the American collections at the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony (SES), a museum collaboration with sites in Leipzig, Dresden, and Herrnhut. The SES is part of the State Art Collections Dresden (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, SKD), a collaboration of fifteen state-run museums in Saxony holding more than a million objects.

After I did a post-graduate internship at the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig in 2011, I already knew the North American collection and many of the colleagues. I’ve spent much of last year working with the collections, and was involved with research and exhibition project at all sites.

My tasks as a curator, apart from research in collections and contributions to exhibition projects, include a lot of provenance research involving object and collector biographies and archival research. This is in part because collections from colonial contexts (e.g., human remains and sensitive objects) have received a lot of public attention in Germany in recent years. Museums put much effort and funding into investigating the history and the problematic aspects of their own collections. This is also tied in with the current large-scale task at SKD to put the entire collection into a searchable online database.

We plan to open new permanent exhibitions at Leipzig and Herrnhut in the early 2020s, so the next few years will bring intense institutional self-reflection and mapping out a course toward modern museums that reflect the state of scholarship, intercultural relations, and contemporary public debates of twenty-first century Germany and Europe.