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….

Official Brown University page

LinkedIn

Complete CV

2-page cv

Areas of Work

• 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
• “AI for Local History Organizations,” AASLH Technical Leaflet 308, 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

• Working with Claude on Revolutionary War Veterans’ Pension Applications
  Last week, two Substack emails got me thinking about digital humanities projects again. Ethan Mollick’s “The Dot and the Swarm” called my attention to “the bitter lesson”— “the hard truth, learned over and over again, that things that we thought required elaborate human rules and thinking can be solved with the brute force of better… Read more: Working with Claude on Revolutionary War Veterans’ Pension Applications
• Sarah Helen Whitman meets Little Compton meets AI
  Little Compton; it’s so beautiful! and so far away! Last year I published an article on how that commonly-held Rhode Island belief came to be. “So Near, Yet, Oh, How Far”: Creating Little Compton as a Summer Destination” (Rhode Island History, Fall 2025) was based on a talk I gave at the Little Compton Historical… Read more: Sarah Helen Whitman meets Little Compton meets AI
• Revolutionary Little Compton: The Semiquincentary at a Local History Museum
  It’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

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