My innovative work as a museum professional over several decades has been effected in a range of creative, curatorial and strategic leadership roles, and has encompassed science, engineering, medicine, natural history, and art and design museums. Many of my research and exhibition projects have investigated and reflected on museum practice itself, and on the history of collections as an episteme of wider knowledge practices. Museums are inherently interdisciplinary knowledge institutions, and through them, research activities can extend both out of and into material culture — and range across all fields of human endeavour. I have worked in, researched with and taught through museums in the UK, the USA, Denmark and Canada.

Museums

Museum Godeffroy, Hamburg: The South Sea in the North Sea

Senior Research Fellow, Understanding Written Artefacts, University of Hamburg  (2019-2020)   The ‘Museum Godeffroy’ of Hamburg was both short-lived (1861-1885) as a public venue and incredibly long-lived in terms of its impact. Its extensive trade with other significant
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Politics of Natural History

Natural historical materials, beyond the more obvious case of physical anthropology, have remained until quite recently largely outside of the important discussion and debate around heritage — both tangible and intangible — in relation to human rights and cultural goods across an
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Research Fellow, University of Göttingen (2018)

Deepening and renewing the connections between university research and collections, the University of Göttingen has created a ‘Zentrale Kustodie’  as a development centre for its extraordinarily rich collections, amassed over 250 years. It has a dedicated and highly trained staff under the
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Deputy Director: V&A Research Institute

VARI — the Victoria and Albert Museum Research Institute is a new programme of research and teaching partnerships to enhance access to the V&A’s collections and develop new approaches to research, training, display and interpretation. I have been appointed
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Senior Research Associate, Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage

Senior Research Associate, Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage (2015-2016) AAFH — or ‘Heritage Futures’ — is a flagship four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council in the ‘Care for the Future’ strategic programme.
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Collections-Based Research: University of Reading

Collections-Based Research Programme Director, University of Reading (first cohort 2013-2014) An increasing number of researchers from the humanities and beyond understandably want to work directly with material culture: this new programme is focused on skills training to enable
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Museums as Social Learning Spaces: Denmark

‘Inclusion and Interdisciplinarity’ at Social Learning Space & Knowledge Producing Processes: the Danish Museums & Galleries User Survey (May 2013) As part of a group of four international experts, I participated in a week-long tour of Danish Museums
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Artists Work in the (Science) Museum

‘Science Lesson,’ Artists work in the museum: histories, interventions and subjectivity, Victoria and Albert Museum (October 2012) “Artists, curators, historians and museum professionals explore the history of artists as museum professionals, museum and archive as the content of
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Senior Research Associate: Reconstructing Sloane

Research and Project Management, Reconstructing Sloane (2011 – present)   The vast Enlightenment-era collections amassed by Sir Hans Sloane are the foundation-stone of the British Museum, British Library and Natural History Museum. A major interdisciplinary digital humanities research
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Martha Fleming

Martha Fleming has been working in the interdisciplinary nexus between the sciences, the humanities and the fine arts for several decades. She has forged innovative and productive methodological alignments across disciplines as a museum professional, academic and artist. Able to integrate practice and theory in meticulous and rigorous ways, her fields of interest span visual culture, book arts, history of science, public art, biomedicine, astrophysics, design and more. This site features highlights from some of her projects, large and small, and shows how they are related.


site by U2R

© Martha Fleming : arts | sciences | humanities : interdisciplines