With its extensive collection, the Archaeological Museum of the University of Münster offers all those interested exciting insights into the art and handicrafts of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean region, the Near East, Ancient Egypt, Southern Arabia and late medieval and early modern Münster.

The exhibition looks at the traces of German colonialism in Münster and its consequences. Exhibits from the years between 1884 and 1918 with a connection to Münster illustrate how ethnological exhibitions, colonial goods shops and contemporary everyday goods supported stereotypes also in Münster and how multifaceted the effects of colonial policy are to this day. The presentation is the result of a collaboration between the Münster City Museum, the Department of History and the Institute for Didactics of History at the University of Münster and twelve other partner institutions.

From glass slides and photographic prints to online image databases: an exhibition by the Centre for Advanced Study “Access to cultural goods in digital change” is dedicated to media change in art history. Students have examined which images have found their way into the ‘musée imaginaire’ of art history teaching, how contemporary art is reacting to the disappearance of analogue image carriers and how reliable image information is in the age of ‘deep fakes’ and artificial intelligence.

The digital exhibition uses letters, photographs, music manuscripts, concert programmes and numerous other objects to illustrate the eventful life of the composer and conductor Julius Otto Grimm (1827–1903). Grimm worked as a conductor, composer and musician in Münster from 1860 to 1900. He was also a lecturer in music theory and singing and to a certain extent founded music education in an academic context in Münster. For almost 100 years, his personal legacy has remained largely unprocessed in the Münster city archives.

“Roman colonies” were places where veteran soldiers were usually settled. You could tell that you were in a colonia not only by the administrative structures, but also by looking in your wallet. The coins of the Roman colonies combined pre-Roman local history on the reverse with Latin inscriptions and images familiar from Rome on the obverse. The online exhibition shows the peculiarities but also the similarities of the colony coins.

The programme of a discipline can be found in outlines, handbooks and encyclopaedias. The history of science is usually written linearly as progress and improvement. A historical-epistemological perspective, on the other hand, is interested in the media and techniques of scientific work – book collections, teaching materials, library systematics. As part of a teaching research project in the MA Cultural Anthropology programme, this material was made visible as traces in 2013/2014.