Dominic is the Manager, Curation and Stewardship, Anatomy and Artifact Collections and the curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum collection. You’ll find him in the Center for the History of Medicine at Countway. He’s responsible for stewarding the historical anatomy and pathology collections of Harvard's legacy medical museum and developing the modern medical artifact collections associated with Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Dominic is the primary point of contact for all museum collections at the Center, and is responsible for museum acquisitions, loans, collections management, research, outreach, and exhibition.
Since arriving at the Center in 2007, Dominic’s primary academic and professional focus is the history, evolution, and future of legacy anatomy and pathology museums in the United States. He is actively involved in communities discussing the ethical management of these historical museums of human remains and how to reconcile these challenging and sensitive collections with the way they were constituted and institutionalized. Additionally, Dominic is interested in the further integration of museum and traditional library special collections environments to facilitate a better discovery and research experience for scholars and the public.
Dominic received a BA in history from Colgate University and a MA in Museology from the University of Washington, Seattle. Dominic earned an additional MA in Liberal Arts, History from the Harvard Extension School where he wrote a thesis entitled "The Catholic Brahmin and the Anatomy Act of 1898: Thomas Dwight and the Normalization of the Medical Cadaver Supply in Late Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts." In 2014, Dominic was part of the curatorial team that developed the exhibition "Body of Knowledge: A History of Anatomy (in 3 Parts)” at Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, which was awarded the British Society for the History of Science Great Exhibitions 2014 Prize for Small Exhibitions. With Jon Cornwall, Thomas H. Champney, Carlina de la Cova, Sabine Hildebrandt, Jason C. Mussell, Andreas Winkelmann, and Valerie B. DeLeon, he collaborated on the American Association for Anatomy's "Recommendations for the Management of Legacy Anatomical Collections," published in The Anatomical Record on March 18, 2024. He was a member of Harvard's Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections and is currently an ex-officio member of Harvard's Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections Research Review and Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections Returns committees. Dominic is a past president of the Medical Museum Association and is the current chair of the LAMPHHS (Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences) Ad Hoc Committee on the Ethical Management of Legacy Human Remains Collections.
