Living Inside: Displaying difficult subjects and working with academic institutions

Living Inside: Six voices from the history of Irish prison reform was an exhibition at Kilmainham Gaol from February to June 2019. Forming part of a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, it was curated by UCD Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Dr Oisín Wall and co-curated by the project’s Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Catherine Cox of the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, and by visual artist Dr. Sinead McCann. This article discusses the Kilmainham Gaol Museum’s motivation for engaging with the project and how the challenge of presenting the difficult subject of recent prisoners’ histories shaped the exhibition. The article will also discuss how museum partnerships with third-level educational institutions can enable visitors to engage with the latest academic research in a stimulating way.