Selected Biographies
Janet Marstine - Director, Institute of Museum Ethics
Janet Marstine is founder and Director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University. In 2007 her application for the Institute of Museum Ethics was one of ten projects awarded a three-year Twenty First Century Museum Professionals Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums.
Dr. Marstine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Music at Seton Hall where she teaches undergraduate art history and graduate museum studies courses. Marstine’s research areas include museum ethics; institutional critique; exhibitionary practice; and feminist theory. Marstine is the editor of New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2005) for which she also co-wrote an article with Lyndel King on institutional critique in the university museum. In October 2007 she published “What a Mess! Claiming a Space for Undergraduate Student Experimentation in the University Museum” in Museum Management and Curatorship.
Marstine has chaired sessions at the American Association of Museums (2007) and College Art Association (2001) conferences and will chair a session on “New Thoughts on Teaching Museum Ethics” at the 2009 CAA conference. She has presented papers at the International Council of Museums University Museums and Collections Conference (2006), the Skidmore College Conference on the College Museum (2006), and the New Museums, New Museology Conference, Savannah College of Art and Design (2008). She has experience in freelance curating and in 2002 shared an NEH Challenge America Grant to curate the exhibition What a Doll!
Dr. Marstine received her Ph.D. in Art History in 1993 from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1989 she received a predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She held internships at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Jennine Schweighardt - Graduate Assistant
Jennine Schweighardt is the Graduate Assistant at the Institute of Museum Ethics. She assists Director Janet Marstine with IME web portal development and content maintenance, IME events, and administrative tasks. She entered Seton Hall’s M.A. program in Museum Professions in the fall of 2007, and expects to graduate in spring 2009.
Research on the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad piqued her interest in museum ethics. Jennine received an M.A. in History from the University of Scranton and did her undergraduate work at Penn State University in Secondary Social Studies Education. She has over two years of college teaching experience in American History survey courses from Northampton Community College, Monroe Campus, and Misericordia University, and was invited to teach at the University of Scranton in fall of 2007 prior to deciding to return to school as a student. She hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in history, publish, and continue to teach at the college level, as well as establish a career working in historical museums.