PEGGY LEVITT: As you walk into this grand hall, you feel humble. You feel reverential. You feel like, "I better believe everything they're telling me."

ERIC JOHNSON: That's Wellesley College professor Peggy Levitt, the author of the 2015 book, Artifacts and Allegiances. In the book, she talks about how museums intersect with globalization, inequality, and nation building. She compares former and current colonial powers to emerging nations like Singapore and Qatar and finds that the meaning of museums is very different in young countries.

PEGGY: They were also really strategically positioning themselves to tell a story to citizens, but also to tell a story to the rest of the world that this is a place you need to pay attention to.

ERIC: Peggy also describes herself as a decenterer. In her new book, Move Over Mona Lisa, she talks to artists from the Global South who are tired of always feeling like they're second class.

PEGGY: This book was about writers and artists and thinkers in Argentina and South Korea and Lebanon. They are happy to take less critical acclaim, less financial acclaim, if they can create their own institutions, their own networks of circulation that don't rely on North America or Europe for permission.

ERIC: This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson. Today on the podcast, how can museums represent the whole world more fairly? Should artists in the Global South opt out of working with these old centers of power? And how should we respond when wealthy donors and politicians say that they don't want more diversity?

PEGGY: Have a spine. Have a moral compass, have an ethical position and stick to it.

ERIC: Professor Peggy Levitt will talk about all of that and more right after this.

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I want to start off with the same question I ask everyone, which is what is a museum to you?

PEGGY: A museum should be many things, but at its most basic, it is a place where cultural objects and art and material culture is preserved and displayed and explained and made available so publics can engage. And that's at the most basic, and there are many ways to do that.

ERIC: And what's your first memory of going to a museum?

PEGGY: That's a great question. I grew up in New York City, so my museum was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I think everybody who's a museum goer has their own museum that got them started. So I have wonderful memories of going to the museum over the holiday season and the big Christmas tree that is in the great hall. And also my mother calling me from the other side of the gallery saying, "Look this, I want you to see this," which as I got to be a teenager was a little bit kind of embarrassing, but nevertheless, I appreciate how she was trying to educate me.

ERIC: Well, as you mentioned, museums can be a lot of things to a lot of different types of people. Your book, "Artifacts and Allegiances," frames museums around what they mean to three different types of countries. Could you talk about how you as a researcher, as a scholar, came to see museums through this sort of nationalist lens? How did you arrive at the realization that they could be interpreted this way?

PEGGY: That's not an original idea of mine. I am a scholar of migration and I studied migration from a transnational perspective. So that means that many of the people that were studying migration at the time that I was first doing my dissertation work were mostly interested in what happens to people when they first get to a new country. When I was looking for a dissertation topic, I realized if you really want to understand migration and its impact on communities, whether it's social mobility in the country that you move to or social mobility or community development in the country that you're from, they're really two sides of the same coin. That was my focus of study in my first two books. And then I started thinking, well, do immigrant artists, do they express the transnational experience? How are they contributing to our understanding of the nation and how it changes?

So I was in Sweden on a sabbatical, southern Sweden, so it was right next to Copenhagen. And I had this wonderful natural experiment of looking at museums in Sweden and Denmark who basically were using the same materials to make totally different arguments.

ERIC: Right.

PEGGY: In Copenhagen, it was about we are the Vikings and Denmark was Viking back in the Ice Age and that's who we are today. And in Sweden, the same materials were being used to say there was no such thing as Sweden 10,000 years ago. We're really part of a global process. And so one was insular, particularistic, looking inward, and the other was really saying we are a country that's in the world. So how do you explain that? And then the book morphed into these three sets of countries, so Sweden and Denmark who are basically over empire, but each of them using their museums to reposition themselves in a different way. And then I looked at museums in New York and Boston, and this is the kind of clinging to empire country case, and then Doha and Singapore, which are using cultural institutions to assert themselves more prominently on the world stage.

But this is not new because if you think about the world's great museums like the Louvre and the Metropolitan and the British Museum were all tools of nation building. And so they were all about having people come into a space and see customs and objects and values that they recognized and then they would feel fresh. And so museums and nation building always went hand to hand. So my question in the book was, are museums ... They're not necessarily tools of nation building, but they're tools of nation reinvention.

ERIC: Well, in the case of Doha and Singapore, which is the third section of this book, I think there's something really interesting about museums, which is that they are very much a classic tourist destination. People come from outside of these places to go to these museums. So would you say that the intended audience of this nation building, is it to demonstrate to outsiders that these places have a strong national identity or is it rather to reaffirm or to encourage locals to have a stronger affinity for their nations?

PEGGY: It's both. And that was the tricky part. Let's take the example of Doha. So it's basically this 60-year-old — or now 70-year-old, almost — independent entity that was really trying to create itself as a nation and distinguish itself from its neighbors because basically they were all nomadic cultures and they didn't have a lot of stuff and they had oral traditions and so they didn't have a lot of written historical records. And so you're creating a national museum to tell the citizens of Doha, of Qatar, you belong to an important place that is going to take its place in the world at the same time that you're doing that to the rest of the world. And this was part of a multi-pronged plan. So when I was writing the book, they were opening 16 new museums, but they were also doing Qatar Airways. They were also hosting the World Cup.

They were also just really strategically positioning themselves to tell a story to citizens, but also to tell a story to the rest of the world that this is a place you need to pay attention to. And then what's the story you tell and how is it different than the story in Bahrain? And what does it mean to have a museum that is from that part of the world, but the architecture still signals the certain power of knowledge? And you walk in and it's a kind of temple of knowledge where it's being communicated to you that this is a sacred place. They're doing the same thing, but they're doing it with different architectural styles and different kinds of display exhibition styles that also signaled they're jewels, but they're different kinds of jewels.

ERIC: And those styles, are they generally emulating a European-style museum like the British Museum?

PEGGY: When you think about the Met or the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, you usually walk up the steps, you're in this temple of knowledge, you walk into this grand hall, you feel humble, you feel reverential.

ERIC: Yes.

PEGGY: You feel like I better believe everything they're telling me. So they didn't do that in Doha, but they hired architects who made magnificent buildings for that part of the world. There was a different kind of style of exhibition that left a lot of space between objects so that you would still feel their jewel-like quality, but there wasn't a lot of written material, the text was treated differently. So still doing the same communication and education, but in a different way.

ERIC: Do you think that there are limits to the power of museums in this regard? A lot of the museums that I'm most interested in are niche, small, boutique museums, not necessarily the national history or the national art museum, things like that. But do you think that those smaller museums still have an important part to play in this sort of nation building?

PEGGY: I wouldn't say nation building in the same way. I mean, I think the most interesting things that are happening in museums are in those small museums. You know as well as I do that there's so much discussion about diversity and inclusion, and even if we're not allowed to talk about it anymore, it's still there. But it's much harder for old, traditional museums to do that than it is for museums that are off the beaten track or smaller because they have to be more experimental and more innovative, but also they can be. I wrote a lot about the Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum, which I found incredibly innovative and incredibly connected to their communities in really meaningful ways. And just as the museum that is there to express the power and the potency of the nation gets their message across, these museums, no one's expecting them to do that. They have incredible collections but maybe not the premier collection in the city. In New York, there's so much competition. And people have to want to come to Brooklyn. They have to want to come to Queens. I think they were doing incredible things to bring the community in, to make the space much more inviting and like a community center. The Queens Museum even had a community organizer who actually went out to the ... It's the most diverse borough in the city. There are people from all different countries, so he would go out to these street fairs or food markets or whatever and say to people, "There's a museum down the street, you can come in." And the museum is located in Flushing Meadow Park, so there are all kinds of people playing sports and using that space over the weekend.

And you could come in the museum and go to the bathroom. You could have your Taiwanese dance performance, you could come and have English as a second language classes, and that is the way that you make the museum part of the community.

ERIC: So Peggy, we're recording this in early July 2026, and just yesterday, the universe delivered us some serendipity. The White House issued a report attacking the Smithsonian Institution, and in particular, the National Museum of American History. They said that it no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens. We should remind listeners that your book "Artifacts and Allegiances" was published in 2015, which feels about 100 years ago in political time. Can I get your reaction to this story and how it either confirms or complicates what you found in your research back then?

PEGGY: Well, it confirms that museums are powerful instruments of nation building, and now we're in an era of the powers that be want to build a different kind of nation that includes particular people and particular stories. And so history is always contested. There are many ways that you can tell it. And for me, the Smithsonian has been an incredibly important institution of telling stories that hadn't been told and telling about people who were left out of history. And now what we're seeing in a heartbreaking way is that all of that progress is being walked back, be it in museums, be it in national parks. It's a re-rewriting of history that, in my opinion, is a terrible disservice to our national story and also to visitors that are going to have incomplete information. Here's what we can do, though. There's a tendency, as we were talking about before, that you walk into a museum and it's meant to make you feel humble.

It's meant to make you feel like you need to agree with everything that's on the wall. And so what we need to do is teach museum goers to be critical engagers with that material. And you see museums doing that now by putting a curatorial statement that sometimes has a picture of the curator. That's to tell you that it's not God talking, it's a person with ideas and they have opinions and it's an opinion, right? The way they're interpreting the material, the way they're telling the story is an opinion. And so we as museum goers have to really be aware of that. I have a whole class where one of the learning goals, if you want to put it that way, is to teach students to read power in space. And that means when you walk into a gallery or a museum space, you say, "What's in the center of the room at eye level with lots of light on it and what's in the back? And what does that make me value? And what does that make me not look at because I think that it's less important?" And so somebody's directing your attention and creating a hierarchy of value, and we as critical users have to be aware of that and exercise that. But it's also museums' responsibilities to help us to do that.

ERIC: I think it's easy for someone to read a book and understand, right, this is an author who maybe has a specific point of view. They can understand on an individual level, this person may have a different point of view from my own. And there's been growing awareness online, people who are skeptical of the algorithm, this idea of a machine that is optimizing for engagement, that's pushing certain behaviors. But there is sort of a middle there where these generally anonymous institutions like museums, generally, I don't think people know the name of their local curator, right?

PEGGY: No, no.

ERIC: And so it's getting over that hump of understanding, no, there's design choices happening here, as you're saying. There are specific decisions being made throughout the process to control where we look and how we look at things.

PEGGY: And if you're not comfortable because you know you're walking into a space that hasn't been for you or you haven't been taken there on your school trip in fifth grade, even if your parents don't take you there, that the school takes you there and that it feels comfortable, not intimidating, then you're not going to question. First of all, you're probably not going to come and you're not going to bring your kids and then you're not going to question. So that's why you have so many, in this country, immigrant communities really fighting to get real estate in the museum.

ERIC: I have one more question about this recent news story related to the Smithsonian. In its article about the report, the New York Times quoted a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Mike Gonzalez, and he said this about the Smithsonian: "It's not the only museum that erases our history and our heritage. All the other museums do. We have to go back to celebrating our country and its great achievements." Obviously the Heritage Foundation is not a governmental organization, but do you think that this is going to have a ripple effect on American museums generally?

PEGGY: I think that we're living through this era where it's having a ripple effect on universities, cultural institutions, and depending upon how close you are to power, how much you depend upon federal funding, how much the government is looking at you, which is more at a Harvard than at another university that's more off the radar, then it does have a chilling effect. But leadership, we see a lot of cowardice and we see a lot of spinelessness, I think, among lawmakers and among decision makers. I'm not saying that they're not under pressure, I'm not saying that this is not real, but this is the time when we have to really stick to our values. And you could make the same argument that the story was told inaccurately for 245 years of our history. I mean, we've just in the last 60 years started to tell a different story.

And I, for one, applaud that and feel like there's still a lot of work to go. I hope that decision makers can stick to their guns and all of us have to help them by supporting them and saying, we applaud you and we're going to come and we're going to go to those exhibits and we're not afraid to show up.

ERIC: Do you have a museum story? Maybe there was a time you got lost, a time that you were moved to tears, or a time you saw something that blew your mind. No matter what your story is, I want to hear it. Head to likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story." It might end up on a future episode. That's likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story." Hey, if you're enjoying the episode, then make sure to follow the podcast in whatever app you're using right now. It's free and it makes sure that new episodes will show up automatically. If you're on YouTube, then hit subscribe there too. Thank you so much.

I want to talk about history of museums and globalization. In your book, you talk about how some of these famous museums like the British Museum started off as collections of a couple wealthy individuals who were not necessarily the most academic collectors of items. Could you speak to how the purpose of a museum has changed from then to now, kind of in the pre- and post-globalization era? What do they do for us now? Or actually a better question may be, what did they do in the past that is now obsolete?

PEGGY: I don't know whether I want to say "obsolete." I have to think about that.

ERIC: Okay, you choose your own word there. Yeah.

PEGGY: Okay. But what's different? Well, we've talked a lot about the formation of the nation, the role in creating a nation, creating a sense of nationalism and reinforcing that internally. We haven't talked a lot about positioning the nation vis-a-vis the rest of the world. So what went along with those collections was to also show the material culture of other, less "civilized," people, including the people that we might have colonized. You can show ... In those museums in Sweden and Denmark, you see spoons from whatever place that people brought them back from, and then you see our spoons in Denmark and ours are better. And Denmark's not the only country that's done that, by any means. It's the other role that museums play that they are also positioning the nation vis-a-vis the world. And you want it to say that we're better, we're more sophisticated, we're more "civilized" than all of these people, and that helps us justify our colonialism, our imperialism, direct or indirect, because they need "civilizing."

And then some of the art that was brought back from the colonies was also on display to do that. So what I find interesting is how museums are being used now to cope with their changing face, their changing demography. Take Europe, for example. There were many countries that were homogenous for generations. There were countries like Great Britain, like England, that had former colonists come and live, but a country like Germany or France really didn't think about themselves as a country of immigrants. Or Sweden. And now all these countries depend upon immigrant labor, but they've been awfully slow to letting them become part of the national fabric and admitting that Germanness has changed or Frenchness has changed. And so now what you see is museums wrestling with that. I don't know if you've ever been to the Museum of Immigration in Paris.

ERIC: No, I want to.

PEGGY: It's a fascinating place because the building that it's in, it's in one of the ... Almost you're at the gate of Paris, and it's a place where a World's Fair took place. So the building was from the World's Fair. And the outside of the building is carved with images of colonial France. So you have the "savages" in French Africa. How can you have a museum that's trying to say to the rest of France, we're a diverse country now, we have white people, we have brown people, we have Black people, we have people from all over the world, and you put it in that building. So there's a lot of tension here about how committed countries are to changing the story, what resources they have to tell a change story, how much the country believes in that change story. Do they have the museological vision and tool to tell it in a way that people can hear?

Because you always have to think about how do you tell a difficult message to people so they can hear it? If I go into a museum like that, I'm like, hooray. They're trying to change the idea of what Frenchness means or what Swedishness means, but other people don't. And that's what we're seeing in this country. People are threatened that their idea of the United States is disappearing. So how can we tell it in a way that they can hear it?

ERIC: I think there's an interesting tension where you have a newer museum versus an older one.

PEGGY: Absolutely.

ERIC: Where if you have an institution like the Louvre, which is world famous, has been around for many, many generations, who can drive change for an organization like that? Is that happening from within the museum, from the curators? Is there public pressure? I'm sure the answer is a combination of all of the above, but could you speak to where the pressure comes from?

PEGGY: Yeah. So most museums in Europe are state museums, so they are arms of the government. In this country, they're mostly private museums, and so they're donor driven. So a big answer to your question is partially museums need donors and donors want to see themselves on the wall, and so that's driving change. And also governments want to showcase the culture made in their country. So the Metropolitan Museum has a Korean gallery, that's because the Korean government helped support that, and it's been there for a long time. Up in Boston where I live, there are Indian Americans who have done well in the high-tech industry and are very interested in showcasing their culture. And so you see more and more attention paid to South Asian art or art from the subcontinent, and that's driving change. Because at the end of the day, those Boston brahmin donors who were the patrons of these museums are dying off, and the people who are going to replace them have different priorities and different interests, and that drives change.

ERIC: Now, as these conversations are going on — we touched on this before about visitors to museums being critical consumers of how their attention is being guided — do you think the average museum goer is aware of or engaging with these questions?

PEGGY: I don't know what the average museum goer is.

ERIC: Fair enough. Yeah.

PEGGY: Yeah. But I think that you're launching this podcast because you care about museums. If the tables were turned and I asked you, how did you get here, you would have your own special story about museums. So for those of us who feel uplifted, who when there was the pandemic or now, when one might be feeling really discouraged by what's going on in our country and around the world, when you go to see art, it reminds you what's good about life. It moves you. It connects you to other people. You're looking at the things separately, but it's something of a collective experience when you're standing next to somebody. So I want to say something about the role of the curator too, or the role of museum professional, because what I also learned while writing the book was how differently trained people who were kind of ... There was a big generational change in how people are taught art history and also what's the role of the curator.

So older people, they were trained in the minutiae of the collections in their charge. They were responsible for those collections. They were supposed to know everything about those collections, and it was a very narrow but deep, deep, deep knowledge. And they wanted the person who wrote to them from Costa Rica about a certain shard of pottery to be able to tell them. And then there's a younger generation that's being taught global art history. That means that we see artistic production and cultural production as connected. And so they know more about a broader set of things and they, I think, see their role as curators in a different way as well. And that's a way that might be more conducive to bringing to light power and the power in space and questioning, critical looking and critical reflection on what you've seen and what it means and why did the person explain it the way they explained it, and is that the only way to explain it?

ERIC: Well, this is a perfect opportunity to transition and talk a little bit about your new book, which is called "Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look At, and Learn." As we alluded to in the intro, you describe yourself as a decenterer, and this is a big theme of the book. Could you explain for people what it means to decenter an institution of art and culture?

PEGGY: I think the United States until recently was doing ... It wasn't perfect, but we were doing a good job of grappling with our history and trying to understand that universities and museum goers and our cultural and intellectual life needs to include a more diverse set of creators and creations. My project ... What I worry about is that we don't pay enough attention to what it means to diversify vis-a-vis the world.

It's one thing to have more art by African Americans and Asian Americans and ethnic Americans in our institutions. But what makes us so insular and parochial as a country is that we don't pay enough attention to all the art that's produced outside the country. And when we do, it's a usual cast of characters who come to our attention because when you become a famous contemporary, global contemporary artist or a global contemporary writer or a global contemporary intellectual, a lot of times you've been trained, you might be born in the Global South, but you've been trained in the Global North.

ERIC: Right.

PEGGY: So we master the same canon, we diversify with the same five people, and it's still a really limited sample. I am part of a group of, it's an international network of academics of all kinds, people who are culture makers, people who are culture managers — by that I mean translators and curators — and then people who use culture in their activism, who care about producing and disseminating and teaching about and acting upon knowledge in more inclusive ways. There are a lot of people who have taken on that agenda and we're not the first by any means, we build on what they've done. But we feel that the discussion falls short because it often stays theoretical and it's not about what you can do about things. An international network often means people in the United States and Europe or North America and Europe, even though they might've been born in the Global South, that we say interdisciplinary, but it's really never interdisciplinary.

And people often critique, they're really good at critiquing, but they don't chart a positive way forward and they do it with ego and competition and kind of individualism and not collaboration and humility and generosity.

And so this is a group of people that are trying to not only bring more people in and ideas in and material culture in, but also to do it with a different ethos, a professional ethos that really addresses the inequality pipeline and how much people and ideas and institutions from the Global South, and I hope your listeners will understand that as a very imperfect term to capture poorer parts of Latin America and Asia and Africa that are still left out. Usually decentering means that you're diversifying, that people, when they would talk about what they're trying to do, they would diversify. So bring in a more diverse set of people making more diverse stuff. And then a lot of those people are very happy to get to London or New York or Paris. But as I was writing the book, I realized that ... Let's call that soft reform.

And that's very important and all power to them, but it doesn't really break down the hierarchy of power and it doesn't really fundamentally challenge institutions as they are.

ERIC: The center is still the same, in a way.

PEGGY: The center is still the same and the institutions operate basically the same with a more diverse content and ideas. But what I realized as I was mucking around for this book, and this book was about writers and artists and thinkers in Argentina and South Korea and Lebanon, was that there are people that are actually, they're looking for a harder reform. So they are happy to take less critical acclaim, less financial acclaim, if they can create their own institutions, their own networks of circulation, their own nodes of activity that don't rely on North America or Europe for permission or facilitation. And so they are really decentering cultural globalization because there are new nodes in the Persian Gulf, new nodes in the southern colon of Latin America. And so the book has these examples of people that are fighting back. So that's one way that the global cultural world is changing.

And another is that some people are opting out. They're opting out and saying, "We have a viable and interesting enough intellectual and cultural scene of our own that we don't depend upon the globe." So they're kind of turning their back on cultural globalization, which is a type of decentering in itself because you kind of puncture the balloon and the air comes out.

ERIC: I think there's something really interesting there about people who are opting out of these previous centers of power. My partner told me a joke that she saw online, it was something to the effect of museums will have an entire room dedicated to one European guy's life and then the next room will be Africa.

And I think there's a lot of folks out there who, even if they're not engaged with this on a scholarly level, I think especially among younger generations, there are people who are aware of the limitations of these historic institutions and may feel like the only way forward is to opt out, to look for the truth elsewhere. If you were working at one of these important museums, if you were working at an institution of cultural heritage, what can someone there do? What can someone there do if they are still attached to one of these previous centers of culture? What can they do to be part of the solution?

PEGGY: Well, first of all, there's a lot of new museums. When you go to visit all those new museums in the Persian Gulf, they're kind of doing a lot of the same old, same old. I mean, they look different but the museology and the ethos behind it, the values behind it, are very similar. It just comes in a different box, a different kind of box. We didn't touch at all about the issues of provenance and where these objects should be displayed. And there was a statement put out, and I'm not going to remember the details of this, but there were 25 of the world's most important museums that said, "We are museums of patrimony. We're museums of humanity. The British Museum is not a British museum. It's a world museum. You can't take this stuff away from us because we are the ones that can protect it for humanity." There is some truth to that. Many more people go to London than they do to Taiwan or to Thailand, but there have to be more creative ways of sharing provenance that go beyond we're going to train you to ... We're going to do another training. You come from Africa and Asia to be trained in Europe, and then maybe we'll send back the object every once in a while. But also, to be perfectly honest about it, should all these other poorer countries where people don't have jobs and don't have health care be spending their money on museums? Like Walid Raad, who's a very successful artist from Lebanon, he's kind of like, "Is that the best we could do? Just keep on making more museums?" So I think there's a lot of discussions to have about what's the best way to share culture, to preserve culture, to think about culture, to be amazed by culture, and then to think of creative arrangements about how we shepherd it, how we steward it. The old arrangements don't work. I think there are real constraints and real trade-offs that we have to honestly look at. I just want to ask your listeners to think about what it would be like if you couldn't go to Philadelphia and see the Liberty Bell or you couldn't see a copy of the Constitution. There's so many countries around the world where the heritage is somewhere else and school kids can't go and see it. And that's profound. That's a profound loss for them.

ERIC: How should a museum respond if they're trying to move Mona Lisa over and the wealthy donors who they are dependent on for a lot of their operating budget are like, "No, we don't want to make any changes."

PEGGY: Well, I'd turn the question around and say, why did all of those tech bros from Silicon Valley show up and make these amazing contributions to Trump's inauguration? I mean, have a spine, have a moral compass, have an ethical position and stick to it.

So who's ever the leader, that's why they're the leader, they lead and they say, "We have a certain amount of square feet here. There are people who this is their museum. How can we redistribute it? How can we use special exhibitions to flesh out things that we don't have in our permanent collection?" I mean, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston wants to tell more Native American stories. At this point, it's impossible to buy Native American materials. It's immoral to buy Native American materials. So what can they do? Well, they're making a good faith effort. Sometimes, in my humble opinion, it falls flat. And I say I wish they would be more innovative, more creative in their approach, but I admire them and I give them credit for trying. And that's the case with all of this. You have to manage your financial imperatives and then you have to manage your educational imperatives, your responsibility to the community that you're serving, all that stuff.

ERIC: Peggy, this has been fantastic. I am so, so grateful that you made time to talk about museums with me for this long. I have two more questions for you before we wrap up. The first is the most important question, easily the most important question I ask anyone in this podcast, which is, if you're in a museum gift shop, what are you going to buy?

PEGGY: [laugh] Not the Frida Kahlo magnet. I mean, that's the other thing that we didn't talk about that because there's this transnational class of curators that go around from museum to museum, you see the same kind of programming and restaurant and bookstore, and that's what we've all — museum goers — have been socialized to expect. And so there's a problem. That is something we should also think critically about because should all museums look the same? First of all, does every country need a museum? And then do they need to look the same? Because who's that serving? People like you and me who are interested in this stuff, but not necessarily the local folks who should be also feeling comfortable too. So what do I look for in the bookstore? Usually I look for a postcard of something beautiful that I saw that I want to remember that moved me.

And my whole office at home is filled with, I'm running out of space actually because this is what I do. It's my occupational health hazard that anywhere I go, we always go to museums and look at art. And so just a postcard, that's it.

ERIC: What's your favorite museum you've ever been to and why?

PEGGY: I guess I have to err on the side of immigrant museums or history museums that bring those histories back into focus. There's the Copenhagen City Museum, which does that for Copenhagen, which was a big thing and is still a big thing. And I don't know, I haven't been there in a long time, so I don't know if they're going backwards the same way that we're going backwards, but it was an amazing, simple, it didn't cost a gazillion dollars. The exhibits were made very creatively, but it told the story that Copenhagen has always been a city of immigrants. Another museum I really liked was in Sweden, which was the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg. So it's not in Stockholm. They really displayed the materials in a much more enlightened way and also tried to really make connections with the immigrant communities that were around in that city.

And they contributed to making the exhibition. So for example, there was a room that was about immigration and people brought objects and told the stories of the objects. So I remember there was a woman who brought a dress that she had taken when she went to adopt her daughter from someplace in Latin America. So it was very powerful human stories that just made the case [of] this is who we are now. These are people just like us. Let's celebrate that. Let's be open to that. Let's embrace that. They weren't a fancy-schmancy museum. They just did it with a lot of heart and ingenuity. So those are some that I think about often. I just want to say thank you so much for having me and it's so much fun to be able to talk with you and also for doing this podcast because it's such an important thing.

ERIC: Oh, the pleasure is all mine. These conversations are fun, but they're also important. And so really that's what motivates me is talking to folks like yourself, really understanding this on a much deeper level than just as an average museum goer, if I might call myself that.

PEGGY: You won't be after this is over.

ERIC: Thanks again to Peggy Levitt for coming on the podcast. You can find links to her books in the show notes. And as part of our gift shop giveaway, I'm giving away a copy of her latest work, "Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look At, and Learn." To enter, all you have to do is sign up for our free email newsletter at likemuseum.com. Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, LightningPod. Our social media specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to Ethan LaFrance, and thank you for listening. I'll see you at the museum.