Stephanie Brown: Celebrating a Cultured and Cool Career in Museum Studies

Published July 22, 2025

As Johns Hopkins University MA in Museum Studies lecturer Stephanie Brown recalls, the summers of her childhood in Winston-Salem, N.C., were not warm and sticky. They were “hot, hot, hot, hot” and “humid, humid, humid, humid!” Unbearable to the fourth degree.

“My earliest memory of going to a museum was when I was eight years old. My mother took me to the Reynolda House Museum (the 1917 estate of tobacco tycoon R.J. and his wife, Katharine Reynolds),” said Brown, who retired from her role as assistant program director in June 2025 but remains teaching at Hopkins. “The difference between what it was like outside and what it was like inside stayed with me. It went from muggy and oppressive to cool, quiet, and peaceful in these beautiful surroundings. So, I guess you can say it was the air conditioning that sold me on museums.”

The climate was a factor, yes, but it really was the museum objects, “the stuff,” that piqued Brown’s interest, sparked her desire to learn its backstories, and set her on her life’s work. It became part of her family’s routine to frequent museums – the Met in New York, the Smithsonian in D.C. The constant pursuit of knowledge also led to lots of books.

“I feel so lucky to have grown up in such a cultured family,” said Brown, an only child. “My father had a very peripatetic career and cycled through professions every three years. My mother taught high school and community college English for 40 years. There was often not a lot of money, but for better or worse, when we traveled, we went to bookstores, and the money went to books. I grew up in a house full of books. I studied violin and piano. We subscribed to The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Even though I was a kid growing up in a small Southern city, I had a bigger sense of the world and its possibilities.”

The world expanded further when she and her mother ventured to Paris at age 15 with her paternal grandfather, to a city that he fell in love with during his WWII service in Europe and returned to every year.

“We went to lots of museums on that first trip, and we walked and looked at things and read the plaques,” Brown said. “I was just overcome by it all.”

That visit sparked Brown’s lifelong love of French History and one museum, just steps from Notre- Dame Cathedral, the Conciergerie, has stayed with her forever. The former residence and seat of power of the kings of France in the Middle Ages, the building transformed into a prison and housed famous prisoners during the French Revolution of 1789, including Marie-Antoinette.

“The Conciergerie was so unlike Versailles with all its grandeur and gold, or the Louvre with its beautiful, enormous paintings,” she said. “It was very dark and dingy, and when I visited there more than 40 years ago, it still felt very much like an old prison. You could really imagine and feel what it might have been like to have stayed there with those thick stone walls and small barred windows.”

After completing an undergraduate degree in history at Williams College, Brown earned her PhD at Stanford University in European history, crafting her dissertation on those women, arrested during the Reign of Terror, whose stories she had first encountered as a 15-year-old museum visitor. She since has worked in museums as an executive director, curator, and historian, designing and implementing collection plans, curating exhibitions, and overseeing institutional strategic planning. Brown is a past co-chair of the American Alliance of Museum’s Museum Studies Networks and has been a member of the AAM Professional Network Characteristics of Success Council. Her first job out of Standford was as an archivist at the Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens in Washington, D.C.

“It was the first time I was able to go in the staff door, ‘the secret door,’ and behind the stanchions with the velvet ropes,” Brown said. “That job was so fun and allowed me flexibility as I was raising my then four-year-old identical twin daughters. We have gone to museums together our entire lives, but I don’t think they have ever gotten over the disappointment of not being able to access the secret door in every museum.”

Brown began teaching a curatorship course as an adjunct instructor at John Hopkins in 2011. In her role as assistant program director, she handled the student internship program, collaborating with museums, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations around the country and internationally. Her recently published first book, The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) made the list of top 30 art books of 2024 by Hyperallergic, one of the most prominent sites for art world news and critical writing.

“My work at Johns Hopkins has been so gratifying because it has allowed me to take my life experience with museums and work, alongside fabulous faculty, with keenly interested, highly motivated graduate students, many of whom are already working in museums,” Brown said. “It is rewarding to help students discover how to take the work we do to the next level of accessibility and inclusion and figure out how to tell complicated stories in ways that bring people in and don’t push people out. I love working with people who are from completely different places, who are doing completely different things and have found their way to Johns Hopkins. I love supporting them as they reason their way toward greater critical thinking, clearer writing, a bigger sense of wonder in what’s out there, and a renewed sense of the responsibility of museums and what they can mean to their communities. I love seeing what they see. Using Johns Hopkins’ networks and incredible resources, our internships put our students in good hands, allowing them to learn and grow and foster experiences that are academically and professionally meaningful. I am so proud to be able to continue to work in this program.”

Perhaps because of her humble beginnings, Brown, as a scholar and an educator, has devoted her professional life to collapsing the perception of intimidation often associated with museums and art.

“What has been so satisfying to me is being able to dismantle the assumptions that ‘you are not a fancy enough person’ to appreciate this painting or that artist,” Brown said of the lasting relevance and impact of her field. “I try to take my work, as a curator and consultant and in the classroom, down to a human level. Museum studies show us how we can make fun things that attract and engage all types of people – from school children to scholars and historians – and allow visitors to enjoy an experience that calls in all of their senses. We can give them a sense of stepping into another space, where there is no buying or selling, and they are not in a hurry. We can provide a quiet, set-aside, more human space. We can bring people together in conversation and help them have a connection in a human way, around their own experiences and perceptions.

“Museums don’t have to be spinach,” said Brown, chuckling and reverting to her eight-year-old self. “They can be lemon meringue pie! They can provide a much-needed space of respite from an uncertain world, a space of renewal and recharging.”

And a cherished place for the true appreciation of art, history…and air conditioning.