Confessions of an award-nominated Museum Studies teacher
Meet Dr Rhi Smith, whose work in bringing the University of Reading’s museum collections to students and staff alike has been nominated for a Times Higher Education award!
The reading room is home!
We are pleased to announce that our reading room will be reopening in its usual space from Tuesday 23rd November 2021.
51 Voices: Writing Voices
Read our latest roundup of 51 Voices, where we focus on the writing produced through partnership with poets, University students, and a local school.
A week at The MERL: our reflections on COP26
As COP26 unfolded in Glasgow, a range of activity was underway at The MERL, bringing together many different approaches to the issue of the changing climate and its impact on rural livelihoods and wellbeing.
Night of the living rural history collection
For Halloween, discover four objects from our collection that would provide perfect utility and inspiration for any rural villain.
51 Voices: A very special collaboration
Learn about the creative collaborations produced with a range of different communities as part of 51 Voices, our 70th anniversary celebrations.
51 Voices: Work, work, work
This January, The MERL embarked on 51 Voices, a new year-long project celebrating the museum’s seventieth anniversary in 2021. Throughout the year, we will be working with a range of writers, artists and different communities to give contemporary voice to fifty-one objects and archives in The MERL collection connected in myriad ways to our founding […]
Uncovering LGBTQ+ rural histories in archives
Join The MERL’s Collections Researcher Tim Jerrome as he shares the challenges he faced in finding the lives and stories of LGBTQ+ people in our archive for our July 2021 exhibition: Queer Constellations. Please be aware that this post contains terminology used to describe LGBTQ+ people in the past, and may be offensive or upsetting […]
Temporary reading room move – September 2021
Between 31 August and 24 September 2021, the reading room will be moving to the Conference Room to make way for essential maintenance work. The Conference Room is located above the current reading room and can be accessed via the staircase or lift from the locker room. Closure days During this period, however, we will […]
Introducing Space to Think: Rural Wellbeing, our latest student exhibition
Written by Dr Rhi Smith, Director of Museum Studies, University of Reading. How do you create a museum exhibition when you cannot get into the museum? Planning your first museum exhibition is tough experience at the best of times. Doing it online during a global pandemic takes that to another level. Even so, within the […]