Anna Köhler

Anna Köhler studied museum studies and English/American studies at the University of Würzburg, where she also worked as a writing tutor, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Exhibiting Culture: P. T. Barnum and the 19th-Century American Museum

Anna Köhler’s PhD project questions the special status the museum enjoys as a highly trusted institution of “fact” and “neutrality.” By zooming into the mid- to late nineteenth century, she aims to disentangle the increasing bifurcation of public spaces into “highbrow” and “lowbrow.” Using P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and the historiography of the emergence of museums in the US as a starting point, she examines how issues of cultural and scientific authority, taste, and citizenship were being negotiated in an era when consumer culture and the canonizing processes of shaping a national culture as a “civilizing project” were emerging simultaneously.