Job Alert: Director, Lemelson Center

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Director, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.  Public History Division, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation seeks a Director to serve as the champion for the power of invention and innovation and to lead the Center’s pathbreaking educational and engagement efforts. The Director oversees scholarship, exhibitions, and digital and programmatic initiatives, guiding the Center as an authority on the history of invention and innovation and its potential to inspire learning and change. This is an opportunity to lead a motivated staff and fulfill the Center’s strategic mission, drawing on consistent, protected funding from the current Lemelson endowment.

To learn more about the Lemelson Center’s previous events, research, publications, exhibitions, and programming, please visit [here].

Job Requirements/Desired Skills and Experience:

Experience in a museum, cultural or educational institution is required; board, consultation or advisory experience is desirable.

Experience developing and guiding short- and long-term institutional plans that shape a sustained, multifaceted program of educational activities for public audiences.

Experience establishing frameworks for effective collaboration and partnerships across multi- format, cross-disciplinary projects.

We are open to non-traditional candidates from industry, academia, or other fields and institutions. An advanced degree is required.

To Be Considered:

Please submit your résumé and a cover letter that describes how your skill set and background aligns with the requirements and opportunities of the position. We also request a writing sample and a list of three (3) professional references.

Applications must be received by December 4, 2023. For more information and to apply, visit this link:

This is a full-time, Trust (non-Federal) position at IS-15, Step 1. The starting salary is $155,700 with an excellent benefits package. The job is based in Washington, DC, USA.

If you have further questions, please send your inquiries to: NMAHApplications@si.edu.

Douglas on museums and memory

Stacy Douglas, Carleton University published Curating Community: Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political with the University of Michigan Press in 2017. From the publisher: 

In Curating Community: Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political, Stacy Douglas challenges the centrality of sovereignty in our political and juridical imaginations. Creatively bringing together constitutional, political, and aesthetic theory, Douglas argues that museums and constitutions invite visitors to identify with a prescribed set of political constituencies based on national, ethnic, or anthropocentric premises. In both cases, these stable categories gloss over the radical messiness of the world and ask us to conflate representation with democracy. Yet the museum, when paired with the constitution, can also serve as a resource in the production of alternative imaginations of community. Consequently, Douglas’s key contribution is the articulation of a theory of counter-monumental constitutionalism, using the museum, that seeks to move beyond individual and collective forms of sovereignty that have dominated postcolonial and postapartheid theories of law and commemoration. She insists on the need to reconsider deep questions about how we conceptualize the limits of ourselves, as well as our political communities, in order to attend to everyday questions of justice in the courtroom, the museum, and beyond.

Praise for the book: 

 “Curating Community makes a really significant and exciting contribution to existing literatures. Douglas is at her best when engaging in critiques of other thinkers such as Christodoulidis and Cornell. The unexpected link that Douglas makes between constitutions and museums is critically important because it directly links law and culture in ways that are not usually noted or thought about, but which have vital effects on our political and aesthetic lives.” -James Martel

“Reading museums alongside and against constitutional thinking, Douglas brilliantly exposes the problem of political sovereignty and the possibilities for rethinking political community. A thoughtful and inspired work.” -Davina Cooper

“Douglas has put forward an interesting and compelling argument drawing on various theorists and perspectives. Given the current social and political climate worldwide, her insistence on the disruption of the idea of community and thinking of justice as the exposure of the truth of infinite sharing is timeous and crucial, a call that should be heeded.” -Karin van Marle,

Further information is available here.