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Fiona Candlin

Positions held:
  • Professor of Museology, School of Historical Studies
Email
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Fiona Candlin is a museologist who has written extensively on small, independent museums; the twentieth-century museums boom; data collection in the museum sector; and sensory history. She is director of the Mapping Museums Lab, in which capacity she collaborates with a team of computer and data scientists, geographers, and historians.

    Fiona worked for Tate Liverpool, and the School of Architecture and Art History at Liverpool University, before being appointed to a lectureship jointly held by The British Museum and Birkbeck. In this role she established the World Arts and Artefacts Certificate programme, which offered specialist collections-based teaching at numerous London museums. She subsequently developed and was programme director for the MA Museum Cultures.

    Highlights

    • Fiona was awarded an Arctic Circle Artist and Scientist Expedition Residency for autumn 2024. She will be sailing around the Svalbard archipelago writing about the world's most northern museums. 

    • In 2023 Candlin secured a second £1million AHRC grant for a project entitled 'Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025'. The Mapping Museums Lab will investigate the afterlife of collections, find out if museum exhibits are scrapped, sold, stored, or re-used, and examine ‘outreach’ and temporary museums, thereby bringing concepts of permanence and loss into question.

    • The Mapping Museums Lab were awarded £190,000 COVID rapid response funding for 'UK Museums during the Pandemic'. Beginning in January 2021, the project used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to assess museum closure, risk and resilience during and after the pandemic. Candlin was Principal Investigator. 

    • In 2016 Fiona Candlin and Alex Poulovassilis Professor of Computer Science at Birkbeck were awarded £1,000,000 for the Mapping Museums research project. The team collected information on over 4,000 museums, and built a database that allows that information to be browsed, searched, and visualised. The database is publicly accessible and free to use.

    • You can listen to Fiona talking about her interview-based work with people who set up their own museums on the Radio 3 broadcast New Thinking About Museums. 

    • In 2018 the Bakelite Museum in Somerset closed its doors to the public. Fiona was invited to film its final days and she worked with the Derek Jarman lab to make The Plastic Phoenix, which can be viewed online.  

    Qualifications

    • BA (Hons) Fine Art, Leeds University, 1991
    • MA Critical Theory, University of Sussex, 1993
    • PhD , Keele University, 1998

    Visiting posts

    • Visiting Professor, KonstLab, Gothenburg University, 10-2005 to 09-2007

    Professional memberships

    • Board Member of the Birkbeck Centre for Museum Cultures

    • Board Member of Raphael Samuel History Centre

    ORCID

    0000-0002-6495-4618
  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

     

    Candlin leads the Mapping Museums Lab, an inter-disciplinary team whose work combines quantitative and qualitative research. The large scale project, Mapping Museums: the history and geography of the UK sector 1960-2000 generated a searchable database containing information on over 4,000 museums. This resource then formed the bedrock for the group's subsequent projects: 'Museums in the Pandemic: Risk, resilience and closure', and 'Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025'. She has been awarded significant funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; and the Leverhulme Trust amongst others.

    Candlin's most recent book is Stories From Small Museums (2022), an oral history of the late twentieth century UK museums boom. Her previous work includes Micromuseology: An analysis of small independent museums and Art, Museums, and Touch, both funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and The Object Reader, with Raiford Guins. She is currently working on a new book provisionally titled 'Zombie Museums and Dead Zebras: the aftermath of closure'.

    Research projects

    Museum closure in the UK 2000-2025.

    Abstract

    Museum Closure is the current Mapping Museums Lab research project. It examines the geographic distribution of closure, types of closure (e.g., whether museums are mothballed or disbanded), documents the flows of objects and knowledge from museums in the aftermath of closure, and investigates the afterlife of collections, find out if museum exhibits are scrapped, sold, stored, or re-used, and examine ‘outreach’ and temporary museums. Above all, we aim at critically reassessing notions of permanence and loss within the museums sector.

    Funded by
    Arts and Humanities Research Council
    Funding amount
    £997,000
    Funder ID code
    AH/V015028/1
    Funding type
    Research project

    Mapping Museums: The history and geography of the UK independent sector 1960-2020.

    Abstract

    Mapping Museums documented and analysed the development of the UK museum sector from 1960 until 2020, producing the only longitudinal database of UK museums since 1960, the first comprehensive analysis of how the sector had developed and changed, and extensive oral histories of the emergence of the late twentieth-century museums boom.

     

    Funded by
    Arts and Humanities Research Council
    Funding amount
    £1,023,000
    Outcomes

    Over the past five years the team has produced: 

    A database that contains information on the accreditation status, governance type, location, size, subject matter, years of opening (and where relevant) closing of over 4,000 museums open in the UK between 1960 and 2020.

    A web application that enables users to browse, search, and visualise this data in nuanced and precise ways.

    A website that showcases the database and web application, and the resources linked to the project. These include curated pages on key findings, detailed information on research methods, a glossary, a documentary film about the closure of the Bakelite Museum, 40+ transcripts of interviews with museum founders, descriptions and images of the museums visited, podcasts, and links to the project publications and blog.

    Mapping Museums Oral History Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, London

    ‘Mapping Museums: A report on the data’. A report designed for the organisations with responsibility for museums in the UK. It provides an explanatory guide to the data and details growth and closure with respect to governance, subject matter, accreditation status, size, location, and combinations thereof.

    Articles in referred journals that variously analyse the conceptualisation of museums and their classification, challenges in technical development, and findings from the data.

    Stories from Small Museums, Manchester University Press, 2022

    UK Museums during the COVID-19 crisis: Assessing risk, closure, and resilience.

    Abstract

    Museums in the Pandemic investigated how ‘big data techniques’ can inform research into the UK museum sector. The project developed and used innovative web-scraping technologies to document and assess museum opening, closure, and activity during the pandemic.

    Funded by
    UK Research and Innovation
    Funding amount
    £188,178
    Funder ID code
    AH/V015028/1
    Funding type
    Covid rapid response funding
    Outcomes

    The project produced new software designed to better collect data on museums, we wrote regular blogs providing updates on museum opening and closure during and after the pandemic, and published academic articles reflecting on methods and on the use of social media during the pandemic. The data we collected also enabled us to update and finalise our overview of changes within the UK museum sector from 1960-2020. 

    Micromuseology

    Abstract

    Around half of the museums in the UK are small, independent and are run by volunteers. Even so museum studies typically concentrates on national institutions and larger independent museums. In this research Fiona investigated how ideas of curation, museum architecture, exhibits, and concepts of the public would change if Southport Lawnmower Museum or the Museum of Bakelite were taken as models instead of the British Museum or the Louvre. 

    You can hear Fiona giving a ten minute lecture on DIY museums as part of the Curating Now symposia in 2015

    Outcomes

    Micromuseology: An analysis of small independent museums. London: Bloomsbury, 2015

    The Micromuseums Archive, Bishopsgate Institute, London

    Art, Museums, and Touch

    Abstract

    This project grew out of earlier work on the use of touch as a means of educating blind and visually impaired visitors about artworks. Rather than only understand touch as a substitute for vision, Candlin investigated the various ways that touch had historically been used and conceptualised within arts museums and art history. The project investigated the rise and fall of connoisseurship, the modernist valorisation of the artist's hand, the association of touch with female identity and sexuality, touch-based education, the regulation of audiences at participatory art events, and ideas of sensory deprivation.

    Outcomes

    Art, Museums and Touch. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010

    'Rehabilitating Unauthorised Touch or Why Museum Visitors Touch the Exhibits’, The Senses and Society. vol. 12 (3) 251–66, 2017.

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    I am happy to consider enquiries from potential doctoral students on topics relating to

    • micromuseums
    • independent museums 
    • local authority museums
    • museum environments
    • museum closure
    • theories of objects
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    Book Section

    Conference Item

    Other

  • Business and community

    Business and community

    Outreach

    Mildmay Stories

    Candlin is a member of the Mildmay Social Club and Institute in Newington Green. In 2022 she successfully secured £10,000 funding from Historic England's 'Everyday Histories' scheme for an oral history project. Between 2022-3 she organised oral history training for a team of volunteers who then conducted interviews with four generations of club members. She edited the transcripts and worked with a sound designer to produce an hour long audio history of the club. The launch of the oral history was accompanied by a series of photographs of the interview respondents.  

    The oral history, two 'bonus tracks' and photographs of the interview respondents are available on the club website. 


    Mildmay Club Archive (ongoing)

    In Spring 2022, builders at the Mildmay Social Club and Institute in Newington Green a large pile of documents tucked under the eaves in the roof. Closer investigation showed that the paper related to the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of the club and needed to be preserved. Candlin has led a group of volunteers in cleaning and cataloguing the documents which are now stored in a dedicated archive at the club.

    Bishopsgate Institute, London (ongoing)

    Candlin has worked with the Bishopsgate Institute Archive to develop three collections:

    The Mildmay Club Oral History (forthcoming) contains the audio recordings and transcripts of interviews conducted at a North London workingman’s club, and photographs of the interviewees.

    The Mapping Museums Oral Histories (2021) contains the audio recordings and transcripts of interviews that the Mapping Museums team conducted with founders of small museums.

    The Micromuseums Archive (2015) houses the ephemeral material on small independent museums that was collected by Candlin during her Micromuseology research.

    Working with organisations with responsibility for museums in the UK (ongoing)

    Multiple presentations on the methods and findings of the Mapping Museums project to Arts Council England (ACE), the Museum Development Network (MDN), the Department of Digital Media and Culture (DCMS), and the Museums organisations group (which includes senior representatives from ACE, MDN, DCMS, the Museums Association, the Association of Independent Museums, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Museum Directors Board and others).

    Media

    BBC World Service: The most remote museum on earth? Pick of the World. March 2023

    BBC Radio 3: New Thinking on Museums  October 2020

    The Plastic Phoenix, a film about the closure of the Bakelite Museum made with the Derek Jarman Institute

    Public presentations and lectures

    'Big Stories from Small Museums', University of the Third Age, Crouch Hill London 2023

    'Mapping Museums and more', presentation to Arts Council England staff, 2023

    'The UK independent museums boom'. Invited lecture at the Association of Independent Museums annual conference June 2019.

    'Mapping Museums'. Invited lecture at the Association of Independent Museums annual conference June 2017.

    'Mapping Museums'. Museums Showoff, London January 2017

    'Micromuseums as Radical Heritage'. Radical Heritage Symposia, Raphael Samuel History Centre, Wellcome Institute, 2015.

    Services

    • Consultancies and expert advice

      Arts Council England: Invited member of Steering Committee on Data Collection