This resource collection features a bibliography of Master’s theses and Doctoral dissertations that were used for a literature review of graduate research examining the ways that museums address identity and how this work relates to issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. This study was supported in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Award #NLG- M-FY18 / MG-50-18-044).

To build the bibliography, two researchers used the ProQuest research database as a primary data source. ProQuest describes itself as the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world, partnering with more than 700 universities across the U.S. to disseminate and archive more than 90,000 new graduate theses each year. They included Doctoral and Master’s studies published within the United States that focused on museum practice and representation of personal identity from 2000 to 2018. The sample of 92 studies includes 41 Master’s theses and 51 Doctoral dissertations from 58 universities. Altogether, the sample represents 41 academic departments with the largest number from museum studies, and others coming from art history or arts management, anthropology, and history departments.

This document also provides abstracts for each work included in the bibliography. Some theses did not include abstracts; for these, we provide only the reference in this section.

We used the publications in this bibliography as part of our data corpus for this paper: Morrissey, K. & Dirk, G. (2020). Identity & Museum Practice: Promises, Practices, and a Broken Pipeline. Curator: The Museum Journal. 63(4).

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