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Author: Steven Lubar

Professor of American studies at Brown University.
Student Work for Public Audiences

Student Work for Public Audiences

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Yesterday I participated in a roundtable discussion on “Student Work for Public Audiences” at Brown’s Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. I talked about last year’s AMST1550, “Methods in Public Humanities.” I teach courses for students who want to learn how to work with the public. Many of my courses are for graduate students in a professional program, or more precisely, a program that’s a cross between professional and academic: the MA in public humanities program. The students in the class are graduate…

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Jenks Society for Lost Museums

Jenks Society for Lost Museums

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I’ve been blogging over at the Jenks Society for Lost Museums. You can see my thoughts on curatorial poetry and  “Report on the food of the robin” and on taxidermy workshops, as well as reflections on the legacy of Prof. Jenks. And also many other reflections and considerations by fellow fellows of the Jenks Society. And a Medium post, now that the installation is complete. 

50 Years of Collecting at the National Museum of American History

50 Years of Collecting at the National Museum of American History

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Here’s the talk I wrote for the National Council on Public History conference at the end of March. It’s a piece of a longer work in progress on the history of the museum’s collections. This talk focuses on the the philosophical and bureaucratic contexts of the collecting at the museum. A second part, perhaps this summer, will look in detail at the changing nature of the objects collected. The big questions: What did they collect, why, and how can we evaluate…

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“An olla podrida of queer things pining away its sweetness in the desert air of the Brooklyn Navy Yard”

“An olla podrida of queer things pining away its sweetness in the desert air of the Brooklyn Navy Yard”

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        By popular demand, the full text of the article about the Brooklyn Naval Lyceum that appeared in the New York Times in 1852. It’s a very odd article. More about it, and the Naval Lyceum, in my article, brand new in Museum History Journal.

Arts and humanities analytics

Arts and humanities analytics

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Here’s the talk presented at Bryant University’s Applied Analytics in Humanities and Social Sciences conference today. Paul Margrave, Nate Storring and I presented work done by the three of us, Allison Roberts, Mark Motte of Rhode Island College, and students in his GEOG339 class. Two parts to the presentation. The first is a very general overview of some of the types of work that might be called humanities analytics: a lot of it is digital humanities, but it also includes other…

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21st-Century History of Technology: Fashioning a Usable Past

21st-Century History of Technology: Fashioning a Usable Past

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Yesterday the MIT Museum and the Hagley Museum and Library ran a fascinating workshop on “Doing the History of Technology in the 21st Century.” The workshop, at the MIT Museum, brought together historians, museum curators, public humanists, and more to talk about how the history of technology is changing – and how it needs to change – to play the role it needs to play as our sources, audiences, media, and interests change. It was partly about the digital, but more…

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The Humanities: Public, Open, Applied & Engaged

The Humanities: Public, Open, Applied & Engaged

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Just back from my trip to the University of Glasgow. A delight to meet with faculty and students there and to learn more about their extensive community engagement programs. I gave a talk about public humanities programs in the United States, focusing on Brown’s program. Here’s the slides from my talk. When I have time to rewrite it, I’ll post the written-out version here. Any comments welcome.

One Room (The after post)

One Room (The after post)

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Well, I enjoyed it. The audience was mostly RISD Museum staff – not much of a surprise, given the topic. Interesting to them, less so to the general museum-visiting public. My two hours was mostly conversation. I had imagined actually doing serious work on my visualizing project. Instead, it was more like showing colleagues a really neat new tool I was playing with that might be useful to them. That’s one of my favorite things, and I think that the…

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