The ITP Team at Work: First Monthly Update from Claire Messenger

Written by Claire Messenger, International Training Programme Manager

As a regular feature for the ITP blog Becca, Jess and I thought we would give you updates on the projects and programmes we are personally working on, so each month we will be sharing news on what’s happening here at the BM and within the ITP team.

For me, this last month has been all about planning and preparation – for Mumbai in just a couple of weeks and for the summer programme which will start on 8 July 2019. I’ve been working with my lovely ITP colleague Bilwa Kulkarni, Assistant Curator of Education at CSMVA and an ITP 2015 fellow, to come up with a diverse and innovative programme for our next ITP+ course, Museums and education. Working across the world – with the added complications of time difference – can be difficult but knowing Bilwa and CSMVS so well it has not only been very easy, it’s been great fun. And working with colleagues that are new to the ITP network – Ed Lawless from here at the British Museum, Jo Mawdsley from V&A Dundee and Jan Pitman from Norfolk Museum Service – means I have been able to learn more about new and exciting projects not only happening ‘on my doorstep’ here at the BM but around the country.

More to come on Mumbai, of course, and once we have our programme and course resources finished, I’ll be sharing those with you.

And for 2019, I’ve been working with my colleagues in the curatorial departments to find our fellows for the next ITP summer programme. I’ll look forward to sharing our final list of participants with you next month but I can tell you we’ll have some exciting new countries to work with this year and I’d like to thank our alumni for so kindly recommending colleagues and institutions to us. Having our network’s input is proving invaluable and something we’d like to encourage more of in the future.

In other news: some of you will have met our colleague Eirini Koutsouroupa who managed the administration team in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan and has always been an invaluable help to us during the summer programme as part of the ‘meet and greet’ group collecting fellows from the airport and travelling to some of our UK partner museums including Glasgow and Newcastle. Eirini has moved internally to join the Museum’s Registrar’s Office. Now she will be working exclusively on loans out of the British Museum but we hope she’ll still have the opportunity to meet this summer’s fellows when the Registrar’s team deliver a session on loans as part of the programme this year.

I’ll be looking forward to sharing more news with you next month and if anyone would like to join us and let us know what their working on at the moment we’d love to hear all about it.

Claire