Skip to main content

Fiona Candlin

Positions held:
  • Professor of Museology, Department of History of Art
Email
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Fiona Candlin worked in the education department at Tate Liverpool, and in the School of Architecture and Art History at Liverpool University, before being appointed to a lectureship jointly held by The British Museum and Birkbeck in 2000. In this role she established and organised the World Arts and Artefacts Certificate programme, which offered specialist collections-based teaching at numerous London museums. She joined the department of History of Art at Birkbeck in 2009, where she worked with colleagues to establish the MA Museum Cultures. She has published widely on various aspects of museums, particularly on small independent museums, data collection in the museum sector, and the history of touch. 

    Highlights

    • In 2016 Fiona Candlin and Alex Poulovassilis Professor of Computer Science at Birkbeck were awarded £1,000,000 by the AHRC for the Mapping Museums research project. The team has since collected information on over 4,000 museums, and then built a database that allows that information to be browsed, searched, and visualised. The database is publicly accessible and free to use.

      Fiona and the Mapping Museums team have produced a report that identifies and analyses trends in the emergence, distribution, and closure of UK museums since 1960. 

    • The Mapping Museums research team have been awarded £190,000 COVID rapid response funding for their work on UK Museums during the Pandemic. Beginning in January 2021, the project will use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to assess museum closure, risk and resilience during and after the crisis. There is more information on the project blog.  

    • You can listen to Fiona talking about her interview-based work with people who set up their own museums on the Radio 3 broadcast New Thinking About Museums. 

    • In 2018 the Bakelite Museum in Somerset closed its doors to the public. Fiona was invited to film its final days and she worked with the Derek Jarman lab to make The Plastic Phoenix, which can be viewed online.  

    Qualifications

    • BA (Hons) Fine Art, Leeds University, 1991
    • MA Critical Theory, University of Sussex, 1993
    • PhD , Keele University, 1998

    Administrative responsibilities

    • MA Museum Cultures programme leader

    Visiting posts

    • Visiting Professor, KonstLab, Gothenburg University, 10-2005 to 09-2007

    Professional memberships

    • Board Member of the Birkbeck Centre for Museum Cultures

    • Board Member of Raphael Samuel History Centre

    ORCID

    0000-0002-6495-4618
  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    Fiona Candlin has written extensively on histories and theories of museums. Her work has consistently examined and challenged received conceptions of museums, of what they do, how they are used, who founds and runs them, and of how they are studied.

    Candlin was the director of two large-scale AHRC-funded research projects, both involving a multi-disciplinary team of computer and data scientists, historians, and museologists. Mapping Museums documented and analysed the development of the UK museum sector from 1960 until 2020, producing the only longitudinal database of UK museums since 1960, the first comprehensive analysis of how the sector had developed and changed, and the book Stories From Small Museums. Here, Candlin explained how and why community and special interest groups established their own museums and in so doing changed the profile of the UK museum sector.

    UK Museums in the Pandemic started where the Mapping Museums research finished. The project developed and used innovative web-scraping technologies to document and assess museum opening, closure, and activity during the pandemic.

    Mapping Museums developed out of Candlin’s previous Leverhulme-funded study of small independent museums. Arguing that the study of micromuseums could change dominant ideas about what museums are and do, her book Micromuseology analysed museums including the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle, the Bakelite Museum in Somerset, and the Lurgan history Museum in Northern Ireland. Before that, Fiona wrote histories of touch in museums, and was particularly interested in how audiences touch exhibits without permission.

    Her new work considers experimental museums and notions of museum permanence. 

    Research projects

    UK Museums during the COVID-19 crisis: Assessing risk, closure, and resilience.

    Abstract

    The Museums in the Pandemic project investigates how ‘big data techniques’ can inform research into the UK museum sector. It combined qualitative and quantitative research, and had three inter-related strands:

    Developed new ways to collect data on museums. We used web analytics, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis to digitally track trends as they emerge. The data was analysed with respect to museum characteristics – such as governance, location and size – to provide a nuanced understanding of the sector at a given moment.
    Manually checked and validated the information generated by big data collection.
    Used interview-based research to better understand what constituted risk during a pandemic, the triggers for permanent closure, and how museums remained resilient.

    Funded by
    UK Research and Innovation
    Funding amount
    £188,178
    Funder ID code
    AH/V015028/1
    Funding type
    Covid rapid response funding
    Outcomes

    The project produced new software designed to better collect data on museums, we wrote regular blogs providing updates on museum opening and closure during and after the pandemic, and published academic articles reflecting on methods and on the use of social media during the pandemic. The data we collected also enabled us to update and finalise our overview of changes within the UK museum sector from 1960-2020. 

    Mapping Museums: The history and geography of the UK independent sector 1960-2020.

    Abstract

    Mapping Museums was a large scale multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research project that investigated, documented, and analysed the development of the UK museum sector from 1960 until 2020.

    During the late twentieth century there was a massive increase in the number of museums in the UK. Commentators of the time viewed the expansion as a cultural phenomenon and claimed it as a revolution in museum practice, but very little firm information was available on the subject. Although it was generally accepted that the majority of the new museums were independent, it was often unclear exactly when the museums opened, where, what subjects they covered, or whether or not they had survived. Moreover, we did not know how the sector had changed since this period of expansion, and if it had continued to do so. The Mapping Museums project remediedhttps://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526166883/ this knowledge gap.

     

    Funded by
    Arts and Humanities Research Council
    Funding amount
    £1,023,000
    Outcomes

    Over the past five years the team has produced: 

    A database that contains information on the accreditation status, governance type, location, size, subject matter, years of opening (and where relevant) closing of over 4,000 museums open in the UK between 1960 and 2020.

    A web application that enables users to browse, search, and visualise this data in nuanced and precise ways.

    A website that showcases the database and web application, and the resources linked to the project. These include curated pages on key findings, detailed information on research methods, a glossary, a documentary film about the closure of the Bakelite Museum, 40+ transcripts of interviews with museum founders, descriptions and images of the museums visited, podcasts, and links to the project publications and blog.

    Mapping Museums Oral History Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, London

    ‘Mapping Museums: A report on the data’. A report designed for the organisations with responsibility for museums in the UK. It provides an explanatory guide to the data and details growth and closure with respect to governance, subject matter, accreditation status, size, location, and combinations thereof.

    Articles in referred journals that variously analyse the conceptualisation of museums and their classification, challenges in technical development, and findings from the data.

    Stories from Small Museums, Manchester University Press, 2022

    Micromuseology

    Abstract

    Around half of the museums in the UK are small, independent and are run by volunteers. Even so museum studies typically concentrates on national institutions and larger independent museums. In this research Fiona investigated how ideas of curation, museum architecture, exhibits, and concepts of the public would change if Southport Lawnmower Museum or the Museum of Bakelite were taken as models instead of the British Museum or the Louvre. 

    You can hear Fiona giving a ten minute lecture on DIY museums as part of the Curating Now symposia in 2015

    Outcomes

    Micromuseology: An analysis of small independent museums. London: Bloomsbury, 2015

    The Micromuseums Archive, Bishopsgate Institute, London

    Art, Museums, and Touch

    Abstract

    This project grew out of earlier work on the use of touch as a means of educating blind and visually impaired visitors about artworks. Rather than only understand touch as a substitute for vision, Candlin investigated the various ways that touch had historically been used and conceptualised within arts museums and art history. The project investigated the rise and fall of connoisseurship, the modernist valorisation of the artist's hand, the association of touch with female identity and sexuality, touch-based education, the regulation of audiences at participatory art events, and ideas of sensory deprivation.

    Outcomes

    Art, Museums and Touch. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010

    'Rehabilitating Unauthorised Touch or Why Museum Visitors Touch the Exhibits’, The Senses and Society. vol. 12 (3) 251–66, 2017.

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    3

    I am happy to consider enquiries from potential doctoral students on topics relating to

    • micromuseums
    • independent museums 
    • local authority museums
    • museum environments
    • museum closure
    • theories of objects

    Doctoral alumni

    • MARK LIEBENROOD
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Museum Closure in the UK, 1960–2010: contexts and microhistories
      Awarded:
      2022
    • MIKE BOWMAN
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Writing by Numbers: Case Studies in Digital Art History
      Awarded:
      2022
    • NEIL HANDLEY
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Museums of the 'New' Medical Professions in the Twentieth Century
      Awarded:
      2022

    Teaching

    Fiona teaches on the MA Museum Cultures and BA History of Art

    Teaching modules

    • Museum Cultures Work Placement (ARVC054S7)
    • MA Museum Cultures Dissertation (ARVC056D7)
    • Museum Cultures - Approaches, Issues, Skills (ARVC059S7)
    • Micromuseums (ARVC276S7)
    • Museum Experiments (ARVC293S7)
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    Book Section

    Conference Item

    Other

  • Business and community

    Business and community

    Media

    I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

    • museum closure
    • small museums
    • long-term change in the museum sector
    • museum founders and volunteers

      Outreach

      Working with organisations with responsibility for museums in the UK (ongoing)

      Multiple presentations on the methods and findings of the Mapping Museums project to Arts Council England (ACE), the Museum Development Network (MDN), the Department of Digital Media and Culture (DCMS), and the Museums organisations group (which includes senior representatives from ACE, MDN, DCMS, the Museums Association, the Association of Independent Museums, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Museum Directors Board and others).

      Media

      BBC Radio 3: New Thinking on Museums  October 2020

      The Plastic Phoenix, a film about the closure of the Bakelite Museum made with the Derek Jarman Institute

      The Micromuseums Archive Bishopsgate Institute, London (ongoing)
      The Micromuseums Archive, opened at Bishopsgate Institute in March 2015 and houses materials relating to small independent museums in the UK. At present, the archive contains interviews with museum founders and the leaflets, booklets, and postcards that were collected by Dr Fiona Candlin in the course of her research. Candlin and the archive are actively developing these holdings.

      There are approximately 1300 small, independent museums (micromuseums) in the UK. They cover subjects as diverse as lawnmowers, lead mining, and Witchcraft and, in so doing, make an important contribution to our cultural life and history. The Micromuseums Archive aims at documenting these venues and at enabling future study in the area. 

      Public presentations and lectures

      The UK independent museums boom. Invited lecture at the Association of Independent Museums annual conference June 2019.

      Mapping Museums. Invited lecture at the Association of Independent Museums annual conference June 2017.

      Mapping Museums. Museums Showoff, London January 2017

      Micromuseums as Radical Heritage. Radical Heritage Symposia, Raphael Samuel History Centre, Wellcome Institute, 2015.

      Services

      • Consultancies and expert advice

        Arts Council England: Invited member of Steering Committee on Data Collection