Search our website
Key in a search term below to search our website.
Key in a search term below to search our website.
The Director of Collections is responsible for curatorial departments, research policy and programmes, collections management and conservation.
Sam trained in the history of science and medicine and wrote a PhD on late Victorian science at the universities of Leeds and Sheffield. He became interested in museums as the focus of historical study before working in them – first at the Manchester Museum, then as Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (which includes the Hunterian Museum).
Sam is an Honorary Professor at the University of Stirling Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy. Previously he taught museum studies and the history of science at the University of Manchester, and was Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. He has curated exhibitions on race, museum history, and the First World War; his books include Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (MUP, 2009) and Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain (OUP, 2011). His next book is concerned with the functions of science and technology museums.
Currently, Sam’s practice is concerned with the role of museums in the climate emergency and Cold War museology; he is PI on the AHRC-funded project ‘Materialising the Cold War’.
Alberti, S.J.M.M. 2022. Curious Devices and Mighty Machines: Exploring Science Museums. London: Reaktion.
Alberti, S.J.M.M., and H. Nehring. 2022. The Cold War in European Museums––Filling the ‘Empty Battlefield’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 28: 180-199.
Alberti, S.J.M.M. 2019. Shaping Scientific Instrument Collections: A Historiography [and] Scientific Instrument Curators in Britain: Building a Discipline with Material Culture. Journal of the History of Collections 31/3.
Alberti, S.J.M.M. 2018. Drawing Damaged Bodies: British Medical Art in the Early Twentieth Century. Bulletin for the History of Medicine 92: 439–473.
Alberti, S.J.M.M., A. Blackwell, P. Davidson, M. Goldberg and G.N. Swinney. 2018. The Art and Science of Replication: Copies and Copying in the Multi-Disciplinary Museum. In Museums as Cultures of Copies: The Crafting of Artefacts and Authenticity, ed. B. Brenna, H.D. Christensen and O. Hamran. London: Routledge.
Alberti, S.J.M.M., E. Cox, T. Phillipson and A. Taubman. 2018. Collecting Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine. Museum Management and Curatorship 33: 402–427.
Alberti, S.J.M.M., S. Allen, X. Dectot and R. Gill. 2017. Reflecting the Now: Project Management and Contemporary Collecting in a Multi-Disciplinary Museum. Museum & Society 15: 324–342.
Alberti, S.J.M.M. and E Hallam, eds. 2013. Medical Museums: Past Present Future. London: Royal College of Surgeons.
Lynch, B.T. and S.J.M.M. Alberti. 2010. Legacies of Prejudice: Racism, Co-production and Radical Trust in the Museum. Museum Management and Curatorship 25: 13–35.
Alberti, S.J.M.M. 2005. Objects and the Museum. Isis 96: 559–571.
Three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, our collaborative project explores how the Cold War is represented in museums.
Find out more
