How do we develop, sustain, and promote a sense of a communal identity in divisive times?
Prof. Elizabeth Weiser's work examines museums as rhetorical institutions: public spaces that do not simply preserve culture and history but actively shape the stories through which communities understand who “we” are.
Her earlier book, Museum Rhetoric (Penn State Press 2017), explores how museums construct and sustain national identity through rhetorical selection, arrangement, and interpretation of objects and narratives. Her newest book, Rhetorics of Repair in Museums of Conscience (Routledge 2026), turns to museums created by historically excluded communities (minorities, workers, immigrants) to ask how that collective “we” might be expanded rather than merely reinforced. Drawing on examples of institutions that confront suppressed histories, competing memories, and contested forms of belonging, her research considers how museums—and communities—can use four rhetorical techniques to create spaces for more complex public identities—ones capable of acknowledging difference and historical conflict while still sustaining a meaningful sense of communal life.