Most people who work in museums, like Subhadra, agree they are magical places. As a science curator who happens to be a person of colour, Subhadra believes most of the magic in museums involves making people disappear. In the case of natural history museums, the narrow focus on animal biology erases stories about how those animals came to be in a museum in the first place, and the local people whose expert knowledge we still count on today. There are stories about race, Empire, and colonialism in any natural history museum, if you know how to look. Once you've got the special set of tools Subhadra is going to share with us, you'll never look at a natural history museum in the same way again.


Subhadra Das is a writer, historian, broadcaster, comedian and museum curator at UCL Culture where she works with the Science Collections. Her main area of research is the history of science and medicine in the 19th and 20th Centuries, specifically the history of eugenics and scientific racism. A few years ago, someone suggested to her that natural history museums are racist, and she's been working out how and telling people about it ever since.


Recording from May 20th Nerd Nite London livestream


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