State of the (Future) Field: The History of Collecting and Its Institutions

This article considers the state of the field of the history of collecting and its institutions. Following on from a 2021 ‘state of the field’ article, also published in this journal, the present piece looks towards the future of this evolving field. The authors pay particular attention to work being undertaken from the perspective of collecting institutions rather than individual collectors. Our principal corpus is the series of Collaborative Doctoral Partnership projects that, over the past decade, have been run under the aegis of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. The article considers, in turn, the following areas of research within the field: histories of empire, slavery and gender; investigations of stakeholders; digital collections research; and commercial histories of collecting. The article ends by looking beyond academia, to consider the recent wider impact of research into the history of collections and its institutions.