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Dolly Jørgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger and coeditor in chief of the journal Environmental Humanities. She is the author of Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging and The Medieval Pig and the coeditor of several volumes, including Sharing Spaces: Technology, Mediation, and Human-Animal Relationships. In 2025 she won the Gad Rausing Prize for Outstanding Humanities Research, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities.
""Part travelogue, part academic analysis, Ghosts Behind Glass draws readers in by narrating a well-known truth about natural history displays--how they both vary and stay the same across time and space--and provides museum visitors and practitioners alike with fresh perspectives on it. Jørgensen frames extinction and its uncertain history thematically, focusing on vignettes of different animal specimens, exhibits, skeletons, and models from over seventy institutions worldwide. Her own museum encounters unfold into ghost stories about human-animal engagements that are both compelling and (she readily admits) hard to pin down. Whether or not you believe any museum's extinct animals become ghosts that have the power to speak for themselves, Jorgensen's voice will affectively draw you in and leave you reflecting on some big and contradictory themes, including the presence of absence and the coexistence of memorialization and lively relations with the extinct dead. Well-informed but not constrained by scholarship in fields ranging from history of science, animal studies, art history, and museology, Ghosts Behind Glass promotes a sense of curiosity and wonder about natural history museums and further clarifies their ongoing role in 're-presenting' nature across many animal and human generations.""--Karen Rader, coauthor of ""Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century""
