Museums, modern concepts of culture, and ideas about difference arose together and are inextricably entwined. Relationships of difference—notably, of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and race—have become equally important concerns of scholarship in humanities and contemporary museum practice. Museums and Difference offers the perspectives of scholars and museum professionals in tandem, using the concept of difference to reexamine how museums construct themselves, their collections, and their publics. Essays explore a wide range of examples from around the world and from the 19th century to the present, including case studies of special exhibitions as well as broad surveys of institutions in Europe, the United States, and Japan.

". . . fascinating and probing treatments of issues that press on both museum workers and folklorists.October 15, 2008"—Lee Haring, Brooklyn College (Emeritus)
"Museum and Difference is about the role that museums play in shaping the stories that we tell about who we are and how we are different from other people. It is an interesting subject.Jan. 23, 2009"—Matt Shinn, Museum Practice Magazine
"[D]emonstrates both the centrality and rapidly changing significance of difference in museum practice and poses a number of critical questions for future scholarship, such as, for example, whether or not aesthetic distinctions can ever be employed in museums in a manner that does not privilege the identity of one or another social group. —David O'Brien, University of Illinois at Urban"—Champaign

Daniel J. Sherman is Professor of History and Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is author of The Construction of Memory in Interwar France and editor (with Terry Nardin) of Terror, Culture, Politics (IUP, 2006).