Conservation can be understood as a form of knowing; conservators extract meaning about the past from what remains, while noting what is missing and sometimes repairing it. In this erudite and virtuosic book, the historian Peter Miller imagines the outlines of a new, expansive notion of conservation that links the world around us—natural and man-made—to the world inside us—our genome, our memories. Putting the work of conservation into conversation with history, philosophy, and literature yields a shift in perspective. It raises questions central to the work of the humanities: What does time mean? How do we write about knowledge? How does care connect humans not just with the world but also with each other? And where does freedom exist in a world of things?
Miller casts conservators as first responders in a world as fragile as the things they work on. He argues that a broader conception of conservation can provide the necessary intellectual resources for grappling with the scale of the enormous challenges ahead. Offering a kind of sketch of a curriculum for that future, Miller suggests that shaping the person of the conservator is as important as shaping the field. For only those trained to think about change through the painstaking labor of preserving and restoring will be able to do the work of policy and advocacy required by our uncertain future.
Peter N. Miller is the President of the American Academy in Rome and former dean of the Bard Graduate Center. He is the author of Peiresc’s Europe, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World, and History and Its Objects, among other books, and the coeditor of Conserving Active Matter.
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“In his extraordinary new book, the cultural historian Peter Miller, gives us a vision—at once synoptic and historical, philosophically large-scale and acutely particular—of conservation as a necessary aspect of what it is to be human. Treading across fundamental issues from memory and imagination via history and politics to ethics and care, he evokes in beautifully argued clarity what restoration and its histories are most fundamentally about. This will be a seminal work for all those thinking about questions of conservation in the material world and beyond.”—JaÅ› Elsner, University of Oxford
“Here is a brilliant synthesis of what it means to practice and think about conservation—from the broadest perspectives to the most intimate of details. Peter Miller has distilled his conversations over many years with an enviable range of specialists and scholars into a book that is both timely and beautifully perceptive.”—David Bomford, former senior conservator, National Gallery, London
“On Conservation as a Human Science offers a far-ranging investigation into the ways in which the deep materiality of the past provides a counterweight to memory’s lapidary transience. In support of a thesis that is as much humane ontology as it is lyric sociology, Peter Miller animates a ‘complicated choreography of dead and living, spiritual and material’ texts, touchstones, poems and practices. ‘Past-work,’ in Miller’s hands, is a labor of both reclamation and preparation, because ‘conservation’ is that thing which makes the world a fitting home for humans.”—Campbell McGrath, Florida International University
“With this masterful reconstruction of conservation as a human science, Miller aims for a new breed of ‘phenomenological conservator’ who could inspire new ways of understanding the human condition through studies of the past.”—Glenn Wharton, University of California, Los Angeles
“In his compelling new book On Conservation as a Human Science Peter Miller applies his expansive curiosity, richly varied historical methodology and formidable communication skills to map out the intellectual history and new directions he sees for the conservation of cultural heritage. Having established conservation as a creative form of care and historical inquiry that bridge the sciences and humanities, Miller ultimately lays out an expansive role for conservators in the care needs of our world that faces a grave conservation (in the broader sense) crisis.”—Francesca Brewer, Havard Art Museums
