The Tufts Museum Studies Program provides qualified, post-baccalaureate students with professional training in administration, preservation, and interpretation skills required for a career in the museum field. The Certificate in Museum Studies requires four graduate-level courses and an on-site internship. Alternatively, students may apply for entry into the program for a Master of Arts in History and Museum Studies.

Learning Objectives

• Understand history museum issues in the twenty-first century and how these issues compare to the issues of other types of museums.
• Show familiarity with all aspects of museum operations and how they come together to support audiences and collections.
• Be able to interpret primary and secondary sources, including material and visual culture, quickly and critically.
• Show familiarity with printed and electronic aids to historical research, exhibit knowledge of bibliographical search procedures and show the ability effectively to develop bibliographies for research, museum exhibitions, and museum programs.
• Display familiarity with (and knowledge of how to find) museum literature generated by museum professionals, and show an understanding of how insider-generated work differs from museum literature produced by outsiders (academics, critics, and the public).
• Understand broad outlines of historical interpretation and narrative in fields of specialization and with public history approaches.
• Understand dominant schools of historical explanation and narrative, and exhibit the ability to apply the various interpretative frameworks to the investigation of data.
• Exhibit disciplined habits of research through experience at gathering primary and secondary historical data and effectively storing them so as to be readily retrieved.
• Show proficiency at marshaling arguments for interpretation or narrative involving complex data, and exhibit skill at writing up results or narrative in clear, persuasive language, suitable for a variety of outcomes and audiences in museum settings.
• Present historical arguments through a variety of means and to a range of audiences orally in formal and informal settings, visually and physically through exhibitions, educationally through the design of activities in school and public programs, and through new media.
• Exhibit knowledge of a language other than English, sufficient for research into sources in that language.
• Work cooperatively on the investigation of an area of historical inquiry and be able to accommodate one's own research to findings of co-researchers and exhibition/program planning team members.
• Exhibit an elementary ability to lead classroom discussion of historical material, assess historical work, and organize readings and agenda for analysis into an effective syllabus.
• Apply skills and knowledge gained through coursework to the real-world setting of a museum.