Research
My research explores histories of Mediterranean archaeology and museum display. I am particularly interested in museums as a space for disseminating and debating new ideas and how the stories we tell about the past change. This has led me to a broad range of topics, including:
- A forgotten object from Mycenae and how it inspired a new appreciation of art previously dismissed as crude
- Nineteenth century women in the British Museum and their particular interest in mythology
- How museums today can make the most of Latin inscriptions by tapping into the human stories they tell
- How a fake diadem can be traced to famous excavators and their very different approach to authenticity
- The use of Greek art in WWII for propaganda
Troy on Display
This book explores what visitors saw at the Trojan exhibition and why its contents, including treasure, plain pottery and human remains captured imaginations and divided opinions. When Schliemann's Trojan collection was first exhibited in 1877, no-one had seen anything like it. Schliemann claimed these objects had been owned by participants in the Trojan War and that they were tangible evidence that Homer's epics were true. Yet, these objects did not reflect the heroic past imagined by Victorians, and a fierce controversy broke out about the collection's value and significance.
Schliemann invited Londoners to see the very unclassical objects on display as the roots of classical culture. Artists, poets, historians, race theorists, bankers and humourists took up this challenge, but their conclusions were not always to Schliemann's liking. Troy's appeal lay in its materiality: visitors could apply analytical techniques (from aesthetic appreciation to skull-measuring) to the collection and draw their own conclusions. This book argues for a deep examination of museum exhibitions as a constructed spatial experience, which can transform how the past is seen. This new angle on a famous archaeological discovery shows the museum as a site of controversy, where hard evidence and wild imagination came together to form a lasting image of Troy.
There is much to interest archaeologists, museologists, and historians in this excellent book, and it is written in a flowing and engaging style that also invites a non-specialist readership. Both museum practitioners and museum visitors will undoubtedly recognise that, although so much has changed since 1877, some of the decisions Schliemann had to make when planning his exhibition remain relevant today.—J. Lesley Fitton, Former keeper, Department of Greece and Rome, British Museum. European Journal of Archaeology
a gold-mine of fascinating information.—Rupert Jackson, Classics for All
Baker makes a compelling case for regarding Schliemann’s London exhibition of his finds as a formative moment in the debate about the relationship between the site of Hissarlik and the Troy of Homer’s Iliad. She describes her book as being about ‘the point of crisis at which people who knew only of the imagined Troy of text encountered Schliemann’s material Troy and the role of the museum in shaping these encounters’. This opens up a new angle on the debate…—Andrew Shapland, Sir Arthur Evans Curator of Bronze Age and Classical Greece, Ashmolean Museum. Journal of the History of Collections
Accessing my research
If you cannot access any of my articles and would like me to send you a copy, please email me.