Open today 10 am – 5 pm
This project has greatly improved my analytical skills and let me focus on developing a way to transfer my skills to a material culture outside my main research area. This was particularly rewarding as I was able to engage with Southwest Native American culture and develop connections to my research focused on Pharaonic Egypt.
The Museum Assistantship Program offers paid semester- and year-long assistantship opportunities for Penn graduate students to work on projects within the Penn Museum. The program pairs Museum projects in need of research assistance with interested graduate students from related fields.
Applicants may apply to no more than two of the projects listed below.
Prior to completing the application form, you should prepare a brief (no more than 500 words) statement that addresses:
All accepted participants will be notified by mid-May.
This program is open to active University of Pennsylvania graduate students, enrolled for the upcoming Fall Semester. The Penn Museum strongly encourages applications from students who are members of groups underrepresented in careers related to museums.
Assistants are paid $15 an hour and should expect to commit 2 to 5 hours per week to their project.
Assistants should expect to commit 2 to 5 hours per week. Exact start and end dates will be determined by the project supervisors. Projects take place during the fall or spring semesters, or both.
Asian Section and Conservation
Year-long, flexible
The Penn Museum houses two large murals in the so-called Southern Shanxi style of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One depicts the Medicine Buddha (Yao shi fo 藥師佛, or Bhaiṣajyaguru) and the other the Buddha of Blazing Light (Chi sheng guang fo 熾盛光佛, or Tejaprabhā Buddha). The murals come from the opposite gable ends of a monastery building in Southern Shanxi, or possibly Henan province. For many years the murals were described as coming from an extant building at Guangsheng Monastery 廣勝寺, Shanxi. However, work by a recent Penn PhD (Qu Lian 瞿煉2019) and others has provided compelling reasons for thinking that the murals cannot in fact be from that building. Their architectural source, whether an extant or now-demolished building, remains unknown. Many other murals in this Southern Shanxi style are known, some still in situ and other removed in the 1920s from their original buildings and sold to Chinese and foreign museums. Tracing this history of removal and sale is made additionally complex by the way in which some murals were unwittingly divided between multiple institutions, and in many cases the demolition or repurposing of religious buildings which housed them.
The Penn murals are currently deinstalled for the first time in a century for conservation, and a pilot conservation project is underway. This provides an opportunity to examine the individual sections of the mural up-close in a way that has not been possible for a century.
The aim for this project is to compile an up-to-date synthesis of recent published research on murals in the 14th-15th c. Southern Shanxi style, their production and iconography, their removal and dispersal in the 1920s, and the architecture which housed them, to support their interpretation after conservation is complete. For a student with prior expertise in conservation and analytical techniques, a review of Chinese publications in these fields would also be useful, to support similar studies of the Penn murals.
Academic Engagement Department
Anne Tiballi, Director of Academic Engagement
Fall semester
Familiarity with creating MyFinds list in Penn Museum Online Collection, archival research, and some database experience a plus. Interest in historical and contemporary archaeological and anthropological research.
Penn Museum has a long history of archaeological and anthropological expeditions, field work, and laboratory research. This research has resulted in new discoveries, collections, and connections that position Penn Museum as a center for discovery. The Project Assistant would use Museum Archives, institutional records, and publications to document basic information about past Museum research projects, including dates, the time and place being studied, key personnel, outcomes, and a summary of activities. When available, the Assistant could also record related publications, websites, data archives, Expedition articles, and collections lists. This material would be considered for inclusion in the 'Research' section of the Penn Museum website and would provide important background for understanding our history of research.
Near East Section
Katy Blanchard, Fowler/Van Santvoord Keeper of Near Eastern Collections
Semester or year-long
Attention to detail; knowledge of the site/general knowledge of Levantine pottery from the Iron Age to Persian period; be willing to get their hands dirty
The site of Beth Shemesh was originally excavated by Haverford College in the 1930s. The Penn Museum also participated but the majority of the collection, including all of the field records, came to Penn in 1960. While the complete vessels were all numbered at that time, the large collection of sherds is still mainly unprocessed. This project will begin a longer-term project of processing this pottery. At minimum, the Assistant will assign a museum number, photograph, and rehouse each sherd in addition to doing the data creation of description, transcribing all the field information on each sherd, and ideally, helping the Keeper date the pieces.
The ideal candidate for this project is familiar with at least one time period represented at Beth Shemesh and is interested in a hands-on collection project. The Assistant working on this project will gain valuable experience in cataloging a collection and helping the Keeper create the standards and goals for a multi-year project to process all the sherds from the site and integrate the Archival data.
Academic Engagement and Group Sales
Semester or year-long
The Assistant will work directly with the Associate Director of Group Sales and the Assistant Director of Academic Engagement on the creation of a Guided Tour for our upcoming Egypt Galleries. This tour aims to share the stories of Egyptian life and afterlife through the remarkable objects planned for display in the Lower Egypt Gallery. A successful guided tour will not only help visitors learn about the ancient Egyptian world but relate to the people represented in the gallery by making connections between Penn Museum objects and the contemporary world. The tour should also consider the history of the collections - the archaeology, how they came to the Museum, and the intensive conservation work that went into caring for and preparing the objects for display.
For this project, the Assistant will be asked to research the Penn Museum collections, make connections with the objects planned for the Lower Level gallery, work with the supervisors to finalize your tour concept, develop the tour outline, write the full 50-minute tour, and compile any visuals that may be used to enhance program.
Babylonion Section
Spring semester
Knowledge of Sumerian; knowledge of Early Dynastic Mesopotamian administrative archaeology
The project will be part of a process of increasing and deepening the coverage of Early Dynastic IIIB administrative documents in the electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. The student will work with the Dictionary's database of transliterated texts to investigate the vocabulary involved in the production of those texts.
Academic Engagement Department
Anne Tiballi, Director of Academic Engagement
Year-long (total of 35 hours)
Working with Academic Engagement staff, the Certificate Coordinator will manage the Museum Teaching and Learning (MTL) Certificate program, designed for Penn graduate students who want to incorporate object-based, gallery-based, and observational learning into their teaching pedagogy. The certificate program is open to Penn graduate students from any discipline, and trains students on developing inquiry-based discussions, engaging with objects in the classroom, and approaching complicated questions in museum teaching, including colonialism, objectification, and ownership.
Students attend workshops, participate in one observation day, and write a short teaching statement to meet the requirements to receive the certificate. While enrollment changes every year, we expect to have between 10 and 15 students enrolled in the certificate program for 2024-2025. Individual workshops may attract additional attendees not enrolled in the program, based on the topic.
The assistant would be responsible for:
Anthropology, Historic Preservation
Lynn Meskell, PIK Professor of Anthropology; Professor of Historic Preservation, Weitzman School of Design
Semester or year-long
This is a developing project in conjunction with the Nordic Center for Cultural Heritage and Armed Conflict helping NATO to craft a policy. My interest is both archaeological, as an expert advisor, and ethnographic, as a scholar researching the heritage and security nexus. For NATO, deliberate targeting of heritage, such as attacking and destroying social, religious, and cultural identity, but also illegal excavations, iconoclasm, plundering or looting, are indicators of atrocities and ethnic cleansing, often seeking to eradicate evidence of a culture. The international community increasingly considers that such actions constitute prosecutable violations, from terror financing to war crimes. Organizations including the ICRC, NATO, UNESCO and UN have different protocols, as do individual allied nations. In the last decade 'heritage' has been ramped up in the global arena, with reference to cultural cleansing, trafficking, terrorism, and crimes against humanity, with negligible scholarly analysis or oversight from the perspective of heritage ethics.
The assistant's role will include working with Professor Meskell on different components of the project as needed.
Community Engagement
Year-long
This internship role incorporates three projects: one ongoing, one in the Fall term, and one in the Spring term.
The fall project will be coordinating a community-building, artmaking opportunity with a community partner, in preparation for a December 2024 program. This will involve both internal communications with museum staff and external communications with our community partner. The spring project will be further developed in the Fall term, but like the Fall project, it will focus on partnering with a community partner for spring or summer programming. The ongoing project will be contributing to a grant database for work with our community partners. Project components may include but are not limited to: participating in community engagement meetings with various internal and external stakeholders, following up on recommendations from the Community Advisory Group, working with museum staff to co-create a community engagement project, researching and outlining best practices on a variety of DEIA topics from other arts and cultural institutions, and supporting DEIA education and training programs for museum staff. Depending on timelines and projects, the intern may also have the opportunity to directly support grant applications for specific programs. These projects will allow for engagements both on and offsite through a co-creation model of museum community engagement.
Near East Section
William B. Hafford, Field Director, Ur Project
Fall semester (~6 hours per week for ~10 weeks)
Attention to detail, ability to work independently; good writing and research skills; interest in ancient Mesopotamia preferred; knowledge of Adobe Illustrator and QGIS very helpful.
The Penn Museum conducted a field season at the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq in 2022. All artifacts remain in Iraq, but the field data, including notes, drawings, and photos, are currently being analyzed and prepared for publication. The graduate student will assist with this process by transcribing field notes, organizing photographs, creating maps of levels and buildings, and placing artifacts in context on those maps. In the process, the student will help analyze room and building functions as well as time period of the various levels of excavation.
Penn Cultural Heritage Center
Dr. Brian I. Daniels, Director of Research and Programs
Fall or spring semester
Close attention to detail; ability to work independently; excellent writing and research skills; background in museum collections, archives, or repatriation and reparatory justice.
The PennCHC Graduate Student Museum Assistant will assist on the M2A | Museums: Missions and Acquisitions Project, a three-year research project focused on studying the practices and policies surrounding U.S. museum collections-including acquisitions, loans, repatriations, and deaccessions-and the relationship between collecting behaviors and museums' missions.
