MA student Kyley Canion-Brewer will be participating in the 2021 Graduate Caucus Roundtable “Rethinking Research in the Age of Digital Humanities” for the 2022 Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference. For this conference she will be presenting her digital project that maps potential points of restitution in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Brussels.

The AfricaMuseum underwent a 5-year remodel between 2013 and 2018 wherein it claimed to ‘decolonize’ itself in regards to both its community role and it’s collection. One consequence of this remodel is a focus on the provenance, or origin, of collection artifacts.

The digital ‘provenance’ tour operates through QR scanning to allow patrons to (optionally) investigate the origins of specific pieces across the colonial and post-colonial exhibits, however, the museum itself in a public setting continues to maintain the provenance of their collections are unknown and thus do not require the much called for restitution of religious and cultural artifacts back to the Congo.

This digital project is a website with an interactive map that seeks to place these artifacts in conversation with BOTH the museum and their place of origin (DRC). The goal of this is to restructure the information the museum is sharing across platforms to help visitors to investigate for themselves the colonial position that the AfricaMuseum still very much occupies to this day.

Congratulations Kyley!

Daniel Fogt, ABD in early modern European history has published his first peer-reviewed journal article, “Migration and Transregional Marriage along the Dutch-German Borderlands, 1570–1601,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History, vol. 112, no. 1, (2021). Congratulations, Daniel!