Steven Lubar
George L. Littlefield Professor of American History emeritus, Brown University
I’m professor emeritus in the departments of history and American studies at Brown University. At Brown, I taught in the public humanities program, was director of John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and faculty director of the Center for Digital Scholarship. Before Brown, I was a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. I’m a 2017 Guggenheim fellow.
For more about me….
Areas of Work
Some recent work I’m particularly proud of
- Tools: A Human History (forthcoming Spring 2027 from MIT Press)
- Remembering the Revolution: Little Compton, Rhode Island
- “So Near, Yet, Oh, How Far”: Creating Little Compton as a Summer Destination,” Rhode Island History, Fall 2025
- “Tale of a Wrench,” and “Tools and Toolmaking in Early New England: A Bibliography” in Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar, 2026
- “Representing the pain of others: Telling stories of violence, suffering and death in museum exhibits,” Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8 (2), 40-57, 2022
- “Fixing as Learning,” in Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, edited by Markus Berger and Kate Irvin, Routledge, 2022
- Inside the Lost Museum (Harvard University Press, 2017)
- “Looking through the Skiascope: Benjamin Gilman and the Invention of the Modern Museum Gallery, in Panorama, Summer 2017
- “Exhibiting Absence” on Medium
- “Cabinets of Curiosity,” on Medium
- “Museums Need Collections and Connections,” on Medium
Recent blog posts
- Revolutionary Little Compton: The Semiquincentary at a Local History MuseumIt’s the summer of the semiquincentenial, and no self-respecting historical organization can escape without some acknowledgement of the American Revolution. Anniversaries, especially big-deal anniversaries like this one, are generally not a good occasion for good history. And indeed, the national celebration has been, for the most part, a complete disaster. Many local organizations, on the… Read more: Revolutionary Little Compton: The Semiquincentary at a Local History Museum
- Vibe-coding for local historyAI makes it possible to write interesting and useful programs even if you don’t know how to code. Describe what you want, wait a few minutes, and wow! Here’s your site. It’s called “vibe coding.” It’s not quite that easy. The first draft appears in a minute or two. It might need some tweaking to… Read more: Vibe-coding for local history
- “So near, yet, oh, how far”I’m delighted that my article about the artists and writers who invented LIttle Compton as a summer destination has been published in Rhode Island History! “So near, yet, oh, how far” is a line from a 1869 Providence Journal article by Sara Helen Whitman describing her summer vacation in Little Compton. Whitman was a poet,… Read more: “So near, yet, oh, how far”
