My book! Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present.

More about it here!  Order it here!

 

I’m a professor in the departments of history and American studies at Brown University. Through June 2023 I taught in the public humanities program and was faculty director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Interim Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. As of July 1, 2023, I am semi-retired and the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History. 

I teach and write about museums and the history of museums, public humanities and digital humanities, and the history and philosophy of technology. I’m on twitter @lubar. My email is lubar@brown.edu. My official Brown information page is here. Many of my scholarly articles are in the Brown Digital Repository, here. Syllabi and miscellaneous presentations are on Scribd, here. More developed essays are on Medium.

I publish short essays here on a range of topics, and provide links to things published elsewhere. I’m working on four interconnected areas now:

• Museums and the history of museums
• Digital humanities
• Public humanities
• Technology, making, skills, repair

I also occasionally blog about teaching and learning.

You can see an archive of all of my posts here. Some of my recent and favorite publications, here and elsewhere:

• About my Fall 2020 course: exhibition project plans curated by Brown students and designed by RISD students
• A collection of short videos about exhibition development 
• “Exhibiting Absence” on Medium
• “Cabinets of Curiosity,” on Medium
• “Memorializing Disability: Lessons for Museums,” on Medium
• “Museums Need Collections and Connections,” on Medium
• Encyclopedia entries on public humanities, museums, and cultural heritage, in the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology
• “The Rosa Parks House,” on Medium
• “Teaching Skill,” on Medium
• “Leave the Durham Memorial on the Ground,” on Medium
• “Looking through the Skiascope: Benjamin Gilman and the Invention of the Modern Museum Gallery, in Panorama
• “Museums are Places to Forget,” on Medium
• A four-part series on the history of museum catalogs, focusing on the New York Crystal Palace, on Medium
• I asked students to write the syllabus. You won’t believe what happened next.
• “Seven Rules for Public Humanists”

Some interviews about Inside the Lost Museum:

• New Books Network, with Ricarda Brosch
• Inquiry, with Mark Lynch (and part 2)
• Alum Book Podcast, with Joe McGonegal

And a podcast discussion of my skills course:

• Finely Tuned, by Gridium

[The views expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect the views of Brown University.]