The Oxford Muse Foundation
The Oxford Muse Foundation (www.oxfordmuse.com) was formed by Zeldin in 2001. It describes its aims as being "to pioneer new methods to improve personal, work and intercultural relationships in ways that satisfy both private and public values."
One of its principal projects is the Muse Portrait Database. Individuals are free to submit their own self-portraits, including whatever they want the world to know about them. However, many of the portraits are written by another person in the "voice" of the subject, as the result of a conversation between the two. The Oxford Muse claims that, through such conversations, it can help people "to clarify their tastes, attitudes and goals in many different aspects of life; and to sum up the conclusions they have drawn from their experiences in their own words."
A selection of these portraits can be found in Guide to an Unknown City (2004), which contains the writings of a wide variety of Oxford residents, and in Guide to an Unknown University (2006), which, Zeldin claimed, "allowed professors, students, alumni, administrators and maintenance staff to reveal what they do not normally tell one another."
Read more about this topic: Theodore Zeldin
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