News & Events

Join us in congratulating Toronto Metropolitan University student Yerza Hussain, who was named the Regional Winner for the Americas in the Social Science: Anthropology & Cultural Studies category of the Global Undergraduate Awards (GUA) 2024 programme for her essay titled "Unmasking Ghosts of Power: A Glossary of 'Hauntings' in Ideologies and Resistance.

English Students Johannah Alilio and Apharnaa Suthananthan win Dennis Mock Student Leadership Award

English Department members Monique Tschofen and Kari Maaren, together with The Decameron Collective, an interdisciplinary group of nine scholar-creators from across Canada (Jolene Armstrong, Athabasca U; Kelly Egan, Trent; Lai-Tze Fan, Waterloo; Caitlin Fisher, York U; Angela Joosse, Canadian Research Knowledge Network; Siobhan O’Flynn, University of Toronto; Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Toronto Metropolitan University) win Honorable Mention for the 2023 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, an international award given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre.

This exhibition examines how museum spaces were conceptualized and visually represented in two-dimensional media forms, drawing examples principally from metropolitan London. Many of the museums of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century no longer exist. However, prints and paintings, often reproduced in gallery guides, periodicals, and ephemera, are valuable sources of information about the objects that they contained: from oddities and marvels to natural history specimens and revered artworks. Such images also document the arrangement of objects and the display strategies employed by collectors and museums, as well as the visual idioms—and aesthetic categories—they used to capture and ‘frame’ their interiors. The contents of collections, and the manner in which they were presented to the world, closely reflect predominant paradigms for the organization of knowledge, which were undergoing significant change in the Romantic period. The exhibition explores how public institutions and independent collectors, in both public and private exhibition spaces, represented natural history, human biology, emerging technologies, and archaeological discoveries, and how these displays were, in turn, represented by artists.