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Category: Public humanities

Brown’s Public Humanities Program Closes

Brown’s Public Humanities Program Closes

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I have been involved with Brown’s public humanities program since it began: its founding director, for the first ten years of the program; a faculty member and advisor, for the entirety of the program; and, these past six months, interim director with the job of closing the program after nineteen years. I have been asked by students, alumni, colleagues and friends why the program is closing. Everyone has theories, and the university has never made an official statement. A combination…

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Short videos on collections

Short videos on collections

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Two more short videos prepared for my “Methods in Public Humanities” course. These address museum collections, one on registration and one on online access to collections. They’re designed as background for my students, but might be more generally useful. They join a larger group of short videos on exhibitions, here. More to come!

Learners choose learning outcomes

Learners choose learning outcomes

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Last year, I asked students in my Introduction to Public Humanities course to write the syllabus. I wrote about this here: you won’t believe what happened next! I didn’t repeat that project this year. In part, that’s because of different circumstances: teaching the fall, not the spring, means that students are new to the program, and the field. It doesn’t seem fair to ask them to design the whole course. And while the end result last year was fine, a…

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Leave the Durham memorial on the ground

Leave the Durham memorial on the ground

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[originally published on Medium]  Aug 15, 2017 Leave the Durham memorial on the ground I’ve been teaching about memorials for over a decade. My goal has always been to help students understand the historical nuance of memorials: what they meant when they were constructed, the political processes that shaped them, the ways that their meanings changed over time. But I must admit: the video of the Durham confederate memorial being toppled gave me a visceral thrill. The confident way Takiyah Thompson climbed…

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Museums are places to forget

Museums are places to forget

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Museums are places to forget. An essay, illustrated with poems and images, on the ways that museums are used to forget things that society would prefer not to remember, and the ways in which museum forget things they should remember. On Medium.  https://medium.com/@lubar/museums-are-places-to-forget-ba76a92c5701

I asked students to write the syllabus. You won’t believe what happened next.

I asked students to write the syllabus. You won’t believe what happened next.

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Yesterday was the first day of the new semester, and the first day of “Introduction to Public Humanities.” I’ve taught this course most years since I established the public humanities program twelve years ago. It’s the theory half of the introductory courses, paired with “Methods in Public Humanities.” It’s usually taught in the fall. But I was on leave, and so this year the public humanities students got methods first, and then theory. It’s an interesting philosophical question: which comes first, the method…

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What might historic preservation learn from museums?

What might historic preservation learn from museums?

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Every year, the Providence Preservation Society sponsors a symposium on key issues in historic preservation. This year’s symposium, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 historic preservation act, asked:  Why Preserve?  From the introduction: The 2016 Providence Symposium, Why Preserve?, will bring together experts from across the nation as well as local stakeholders to examine why historic preservation matters to Providence and all communities. To be held at the iconic but threatened Industrial Trust Building, the Symposium will launch a…

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“Collecting and Collections” course & stamp exhibit

“Collecting and Collections” course & stamp exhibit

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Head over to the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities blog for a post Sarah Dylla and I wrote about our course last semester, AMST1510, Museum Collecting and Collections. And head over to the John Hay Library where you can see the course exhibition, Thousands of Little Colored Windows: Brown University’s Stamp Collections. A few pictures of the exhibit…  

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