Tag Archives: museum

Grand Opening of the National Museum of Psychology!

Events,

The National Museum of Psychology is opening its doors! The Museum’s grand opening will take place Wednesday, June 27th from 4-7pm. Admission is free for this special event and you can RSVP here. Permanent exhibits exploring psychology’s history as a profession, a science, and agent of social change. Particular exhibit highlights include:

  • the history of mental health and illness
  • explorations of the brain, sensation, and perception
  • the study of animal training and behavior
  • and studies of gender, race, and social learning.

Also featured a rotating gallery, curated by students in the Center’s Museum and Archives certificate program. The Museum will be open regularly starting June 28 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday from 11-4 and Thursday from 11-8.

The National Museum of Psychology is part of the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, which also includes the Archives of the History of American Psychology (be still my heart!).

 

National Museum of Psychology Kickstarter Coming April 13th!

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Observations, part of the Association for Psychological Science’s magazine the Observer, has announced that the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology in Akron, Ohio is launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund a National Museum of Psychology. The campaign will begin at 3pm April 13th and “the crowdsourcing project plans to reward donors with autographed copies of APS Fellow Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, naming opportunities in the museum’s reading room, a trip to the museum’s grand opening, and more.” As Observations reports,

The museum hopes to engage audiences on a personal, intellectual, and scientific level. “We have the unique ability and responsibility to tell the story of what it means to be human, through the acquisition, preservation, and presentation of iconic objects, manuscripts, and media,” said Baker. “As a Smithsonian Affiliate, we are honored to take part in the long-standing tradition of insuring that our nation’s history remains relevant and is preserved with the utmost respect to the bold men and women who were pioneers of this exciting discipline.”

More details here.

IamPsyched! Museum Day Live! Inspiring Histories, Inspiring Lives: Women of Color in Psychology

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As we mentioned previously on AHP a special IamPsyched! Museum Day Live exhibit is planned for March 12th at the APA Capitol View Conference Center. The event, “Inspiring Histories, Inspiring Lives: Women of Color in Psychology,”  is a collaboration between the American Psychological Association Women’s Programs Office, the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron and Psychology’s Feminist Voices Oral History and Digital Archive Project, in partnership with the White House Council on Women and Girls. The initiative aims to “immerse museum-goers in the histories of women of color in psychology and their legacies for contemporary psychology.” The event will feature a curated, interactive exhibit, a live-streamed interactive discussion, and empowering activities for girls. Full details can now be found on exhibit’s webpage.

In advance of the big day you can also join in the social media excitement by pledging your support on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr through Thunderclap. This platform allows social media postings to be pre-scheduled and unleashed all at once, like an online flash mob. When you sign up to share the IamPsyched! message, it will automatically post just this one message on your behalf. Go here to schedule your Tweet or Facebook post now!

Launch of New Online Museum Dedicated to the History of Behavioral Neuroscience in Brazil

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Estereotáxico para Cães e Gatos
Stereotactic instrument from collection

AHP is pleased to announce the launch of a rich new web resource: the Museu de História das Neurociências Comportamentais  [the History Museum of Behavioral Neuroscience]. The site features a digital collection of scientific instruments connected to the history of neuroscience, particularly behavioral neuroscience, in Brazil. It likewise highlights several key researchers who contributed to the development of behavioral neuroscience in Brazil.

The site has emerged out of work Dr. Rodrigo Lopes Miranda initially completed while on an internship at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology in Akron, OH in 2013. The Museu de História das Neurociências Comportamentais was created while Miranda was completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of São Paulo. Co-editors on the project include Silvana Delfino and Nadia Iara Ramiris Maronesi, under the supervision of Drs. Anette Hoffmann and Marina Massimi.

The Museu de História das Neurociências Comportamentais will be of particular interest to those interested in scientific instrument collections and will make for a great online resource for both historians of psychology and their students alike. If your Portuguese is on the weak side, do not despair! You can use your browser settings to translate the pages to your language of choice (Google Chrome makes this particularly easy – see instructions here).

The Museu de História das Neurociências Comportamentais has plans to continue growing and contributions to the site are welcomed.  To submit a photograph of an instrument, laboratory space, or researcher connected to the history of behavioral neuroscience in Brazil, contact hnc.usp@gmail.com with a description of the person or object featured in the image, the name of the institution to which it is connected, and any references or links you would want included with the entry (You can download the contribution form here).

Community Announcement: Cummings Center for the History of Psychology Expansion

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The Center for the History of Psychology at The University of Akron, which houses the Archives of the History of American Psychology, a Museum of Psychology and hosts public chp_building_full_coloreducation and outreach programs, will be closing to all researchers from September 1, 2015 through September 1, 2016 to undergo major reconstruction.

Thanks to a $3.5 million dollar gift from Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings, the renamed Cummings Center will include a substantial renovation of the museum, a new library and offices for visiting scholars, as well as an endowment for an associate director. Currently, the museum only displays a small fraction of the holdings that have been donated to the center, a situation which will be rectified through its expansion from 1,800 to 8,500 square feet.

We are highly anticipating these exciting developments! Also, if you have immediate need to access the Center’s materials for your research, be certain to do so during the summer before their temporary closure!

Find out more about the Center’s reconstruction plans and the Cummings’ donation here from the article on Ohio.com

New Exhibit! Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology at London’s Science Museum

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London’s Science Museum is now exhibiting Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology. Supported by the British Psychological Society (BPS), the exhibit is on display until August 12, 2014 and is free for all visitors. The video above provides a quick look behind the scenes of the exhibit and a number of items from the exhibit are further highlighted on the Science Museum’s website here. The exhibit, the brain child (pun intended) of the Science Museum’s BPS Curator of Psychology Phil Loring,

explores how mental health conditions have been diagnosed and treated over the past 250 years.

Divided into four episodes between 1780 and 2014, this exhibition looks at key breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of the mind and the tools and methods of treatment that have been developed, from Mesmerism to Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) bringing visitors up to date with the latest cutting edge research and its applications.

Bringing together psychology, other related sciences, medicine and human stories, the exhibition is illustrated through a rich array of historical and contemporary objects, artworks and archive images.

Updated: Much more on the exhibit on both BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, the latter featuring an interview by Claudia Hammond with curator Phil Loring and the music of the glass harmonica. Reviews of Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology can also be found at the Huffington Post and The Telegraph.

Four Floors + a Gift Shop: A History of Psychiatry Roadtrip

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This is a special post co-authored by Jennifer Bazar and Jacy Young and published simultaneously at both the Advances in the History of Psychology (AHP) and FieldNotes blogs.

The 45th annual meeting of Cheiron was held at the end of June in Irving, Texas – 22 hours didn’t seem like a long enough a drive, so we decided to detour a few hours to swing through St Joseph, Missouri. What, you may be wondering, would draw two historians of psychology so eagerly to Missouri? Why, the Glore Psychiatric Museum of course!

The Glore Psychiatric Museum is the largest psychiatric-focused museum (that the two of us know of) in North America. It is frequently named a “must see” on lists of unusual museums and was named in the book 1,000 Places to See Before you Die in the USA and Canada. It has likewise been featured in a number of televised documentaries on The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, The Discovery Health Channel, PBS, Fox News, The Science Channel, and Superstation WTBS. You can understand our willingness to re-route our drive down to Texas!

Continue reading Four Floors + a Gift Shop: A History of Psychiatry Roadtrip →

Cesare Lombroso Museum

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The University of Turin has a Museum of Criminal Anthropology that features collections related to the famous turn-of-the-century thinker Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso was particularly well-known for his work on the physical defects that were putatively associated with the criminal type.

If you go to the museum’s website, you can take a virtual tour (click on “la visita virtuale” and then “uno sguardo…”). There are photographs of a number of unusual artifacts having to with Lombroso and crime during his  era, including knives hidden in crucifixes.

Thanks for Renato Foschi for alerting me to this site.