| Skip to main content | Skip to navigation | Skip to Search |

[University home]

Centre for Museology

Dr Helen Rees Leahy


 

Contact Details

Email: helen.rees@manchester.ac.uk
Phone: 0161-275 6842
Room: 3.25 Mansfield Cooper


Profile

Helen is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Museology. Prior to coming to Manchester, Helen worked as a curator and museum director for over 12 years, and has organised numerous exhibitions of fine art and design. She has held a variety of senior posts in UK museums, including Director of the Design Museum (1989-92), Communications Director, Eureka! The Museum for Children (1992-93) and Deputy Director, The National Art Collections Fund (1993-95).

Helen has published on topics relating to national identity, art collecting, the art market and art criticism, and is interested in supervising research in these areas. Her own work has addressed practices of individual and institutional collecting, in both historical and contemporary contexts, including issues of patronage, display and interpretation. She is currently developing a new project within CRESC (ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) entitled "Private Property and 'National Heritage': Art, Tax and the State" which explores the ways in which fiscal mechanisms have been, and continue to be, deployed by the British state both as an assertion of the national interest in privately owned works of art and also as a means of transfer to public ownership in museums. The project addresses the question, what social relations are produced and reinforced by the patterns and tensions of this heritage assemblage?

Helen's project on "Museum Bodies" addresses the visitor's embodied encounter with the museum or exhibition and the processes whereby a continually changing repertoire of normative 'techniques of the body' in the public art gallery has been produced and acquired, ranging from regimes of regulation and instruction to licensed sociality and consumption. As well as investigating how the museum acts on visitors' bodies as a medium of physical as well as mental training, the project also explores the ways in which those bodies have rebuked and resisted the museum's messages. Unlike previous studies which have concentrated solely on the regulation of the visitor's experience, "Museum Bodies" is equally concerned with the effects of visitors' bodies on the practice of the institution.

Together with Sharon Macdonald (Social Anthropology), Helen has been commissioned by Blackwell Publishing to co-edit a new 5 volume collection, provisionally called "The International Handbooks of Museum Studies (Histories; Theory; Practice; Mediations; Futures)".

Helen is an academic member of CRESC and is a convener of a new project called "Cultural Assemblages" which forms part of Theme 3 "Material Powers: Culture and Social Ordering" convened by Sophie Watson and Tony Bennett (from September 2009). From 2002-2005, Helen was Director of the AHRC-funded project 'Patronage of the Visual Arts and the Formation of Art Institutions in the North West of England 1770-1900'. She was a member of the Steering Group of the AHRC-funded research project 'Performance, Learning, Heritage', directed by Tony Jackson (Drama) from 2005-2008.

Among her pro bono responsibilities outside the university, Helen is a Trustee of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Chair of Design Dimension Educational Trust, a member of the Collections Committee of the Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello Foundation, Perugia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Helen is a regular contributor to the professional journal "Museum Practice", published by the Museums Association.


Recent Publications

| Skip to main content | Skip to navigation | Skip to Search |