This seminar offers an overview over the vast museum landscape of the PRC and Taiwan and introduces key concepts and methodologies of museology and museum studies. The course will introduce a wide range of museums, approaching history museums, natural science museums, and literary museum alike, inviting students to reflect on museums ranging from military museums to fine arts museums. We will analyze museums dedicated to contested historical periods (the Cultural Revolution in the PRC and the Period of White Terror in Taiwan) as well as examine museums dedicated to simultaneously venerated and contested individual historical figures, such as Mao Zedong’s Memorial Hall in Beijing and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Memorial Hall in Taibei. Analyzing the museums’ collections and displays, we ask how institutions produce knowledge, how history is (re)written in these spaces, and how museums become part in processes of worldmaking, be it in creating (political) world orders or in shaping our understanding of what we know as fact and agree to be knowledge. A close reading of the museum displays will search for insights both into the production and (intended) reception of these spaces and historical and archive materials of past museum displays show how the museum’s messages and the worlds these museums created changed over time, revealing that museums do not merely display but actively create the world we know. close