Danielle Raad
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Museum Ethics

University of Georgia · Instructor of Record

Ceramic objects in glass storage shelves at the Wurtele Study Center, Yale University Art Gallery, 2021.

Semesters: Fall 2025, Fall 2026

Museums are complex institutions with collections and histories ranging from the troubling to the empowering. This course explores the ethical considerations involved in collecting, conserving, displaying, and interpreting artwork, material culture, human remains, and historic sites. We consider questions of provenance, repatriation, and restitution and grapple with the manifestations of racism and the legacies of colonization in museums. By delving into case studies, we discuss a range of controversies and sensitive topics to learn from the past and imagine a more ethical future.

Course Codes: MUSE 5730/7730

Course Topics

Topics include:

  • Collecting and Provenance
  • Conservation and Preservation
  • Cultural Heritage and Repatriation
  • Archaeological Curation
  • Human Remains
  • Restitution and the Legacies of Colonization
  • Decolonizing Museums
  • Inclusive Practices
  • Sites of Remembrance
  • Interpreting Slavery
  • Museum Architecture
  • Museums as Agents of Change
  • Imagining Ethical Futures

In Fall 2025, this course ran as a “Topics in Museum Studies” seminar under the course code HIST 4024/6024. Starting Fall 2026, it is a new course with the code MUSE 5730/7730.

Quilt by an Enslaved Maker in the GMOA Study Gallery

In Fall 2025, I incorporated the Georgia Museum of Art’s study gallery into “Museum Ethics,” giving students the opportunity to engage directly with objects from the museum’s collection. Working with museum staff, I selected works that helped to prompt conversation around difficult histories.

The Georgia Museum of Art highlighted this collaboration in an August 2025 article called “UGA Faculty Use Museum’s Study Gallery as an Extension of the Classroom”:

Danielle Raad, assistant professor in the department of history, is incorporating the study gallery into her course HIST 4024/6024: Topics in Museum Studies: Museum Ethics. Her students will explore how museum practices intersect with broader questions of justice, history and identity. “Museums are complex institutions with collections and histories ranging from the troubling to the empowering,” Raad said. “This course explores the ethical considerations involved in collecting, conserving, displaying and interpreting artwork, material culture, human remains and historic sites to learn from the past and imagine a more ethical future.”

In the Instagram reel below, I discuss a nineteenth-century quilt made by an enslaved maker, one of the works on view in the study gallery.