16/06/2026, 18:00, Haus der Universität (BSR 4a/b)
(Un)Translating the Museum, or: ‘Unlearning the Inherent Dominative Mode’
Dr. Isabel Hufschmidt (HHU)
Guest Lecture
Moderation: Dr. Hannah Pardey (HHU)
Decolonizing museums demands applicable tools within and beyond the museum space. In view of this imperative, “(Un)Translating the Museum” focuses on the hegemony of the museum concept, as defined by the West, through the lens of translation as a counter-practice. It is about workable perspectives to challenge the term as a pan-global standard. Can we unlearn the term through un-translating, i.e. resisting and reversing cultural imposition?
The analysis is not least an advocacy for applicable approaches to the concept’s decolonization and contextualization, squarely for its unlearning. Therefore, a work path based on case studies will be presented to illustrate how to introduce this process of unlearning essentially into academic education at the interplay of transcultural, translation and museum studies.
The talk is part of the speaker’s current research project Ur & Alexandria: Counter-Narrating Museum History.
Dr. Isabel Hufschmidt is an art historian, Romance philologist and curator. In December 2025, she joined the team in the Department of Transcultural Studies as Assistant Professor at Heinrich Heine University. Her professional background has been formed across the cultural and academic sector, including positions as Curator for Research, Academic Cooperation and Provenance Research at Museum Folkwang, Essen (2016–2020), and as Senior Scientist in Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2021–2023). She is the co-editor of Queer Curating (2018). Currently, she is working on her monograph Provenance: Migrations of a Concept.