Jonah Siegel

Jonah Siegel is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. His books include Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (2000), Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (2005), The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (2008), Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After (2020), and Overlooking Damage: Art, Display, and Loss in Times of Crisis (2022).

Why is contemporary culture so fascinated by art collections at risk or destroyed? How did the museum go from being a site of promise to a location of trauma or remorse? At Bogliasco, Jonah will be working on the Introduction to The Sadness of Curators, a study of the ways in which concepts of collecting and display manifested in popular culture — including films, streaming media, and novels—as well as in recent controversies about restitution may be traced to important sources in earlier eras.