Sat Jun 27, 02026, 6:00PM UTC
Florencia Pierri
Insanely Curious: Preserving MIT’s Past to Inspire the Future
Why are things the way they are today? How did they come to be? How are they made?
Debbie Douglas, Senior Director of Collections, presents a history of the MIT Museum's objects and mission.
The MIT Museum’s collection of over 1.5 million objects tells an unbelievable story of the history of science, technology, and engineering.
The modern museum evolved from the privately owned, 17th century, “cabinets of curiosity”: idiosyncratic collections of natural history wonders. Today’s museums identify and collect objects of significance, preserving both tangible and intangible assets, from electronic communications to AI models.
The MIT Museum formed around its objects, systematically accumulating them for more than half a century. Their aim is not simply to document the achievements of MIT, but to tell the story of all the endeavors that the people of the Institute have engaged with in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Florencia Pierri, Associate Curator of Science and Technology at the MIT Museum, is a scholar of 16th and 17th-century science. Pierri also has hands-on experience exploring the MIT Museum’s artifacts, which have been made and used by people who changed lives and history.
Join us as Pierri tells the story of the objects, the people, and the transformations sparked by both.
