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Author: Steven Lubar

Professor of American studies at Brown University.
Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 3: How might we make it useful?

Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 3: How might we make it useful?

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Part 3: How might we make it useful? How might we fix the Ph.D. so that it is more useful for work in museums, or alt-acc work more generally?  What models are there? Before getting into this, though, it’s best to take notice of the ongoing conversation on new uses for the history degree. Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman of the AHA put it best: “No More Plan B.” He describes the expectations history departments set in vivid language: Yet…

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Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 2: Is it useful for the job?

Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 2: Is it useful for the job?

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Most curatorial jobs do not require a Ph.D., but is it useful? Does it make one a better curator? The doctoral degree is not designed to train curators. Ph.D. programs in the humanities are, for the most part, designed to train professors at research universities. This may have made sense at one time, but it doesn’t anymore; only roughly one-third of history Ph.Ds. who go on to teach in tenure-track history programs, the sort that demands research output. There’s an…

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Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 1

Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 1

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Should you get an MA or Ph.D to work in a history museum? I talk to many students interested in museum work. They ask about what training they should get for this. My story is pretty straight now. For better or worse, an MA seems to be necessary to get ahead in the museum world. Whether it’s an MA in museum studies, a related field like public history or public humanities or curatorial studies, or a straight MA in history…

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Museums and the Crisis of Education

Museums and the Crisis of Education

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Just a link here to a post I did for the Center for the Future of Museums blog, on the way that changes in education open possibilities for museums. Some good discussion there about the connections o museum education and other kinds of museum work.  

Contemporary collecting risky – but important

Contemporary collecting risky – but important

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In which I come to the defense of Carlene Stephen’s blog post on collecting Stanley, and mostly disagree with Thomas Soderqvist on contemporary collecting – though agree with him that we need to theorize contemporary collecting better… Museums (at least American museums) commit to keeping things forever, so there’s always a risk to accessioning something into the collection. The decision to accept an artifact has a cost: acquisition costs, processing costs, and then significant storage costs, ad infinitum. The life-cycle…

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Building a Professional Persona Online

Building a Professional Persona Online

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Friday was Workshop Day at THATCampNE, and Ian Russell and I talked to about 30 folks about your online persona. Ian mostly talked about websites, I mostly talked about twitter. Here’s the summary from the program: Building an academic and professional persona online Steven Lubar and Ian Russell, Brown University It’s important for new and emerging professionals to create and manage their web personas, their personal brands. It’s a way to meet people and keep up with ongoing discussions in your…

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Digital Public Humanities (and an out-of-body experience)

Digital Public Humanities (and an out-of-body experience)

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Here’s the talk I gave as the keynote for the New England American Studies Association. Or, rather, here are four versions of it, a cubist interpretation. There’s the notes I used, the slides I showed, the twitter stream that resulted, and, in the background, the collection of syllabi I used for evidence. The slides, but without all of the fancy transitions: My notes, not cleaned up – not a paper, just reminders of what to say: Most interesting, the Twitter…

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Questions to ask when visiting a museum

Questions to ask when visiting a museum

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Some of my students recently made a field trip to a local museum. These are some questions I suggested they might want to ask the staff to understand their work and the way they work with each other and the public. Additions and suggestions welcome. Behind the scenes: How to ask questions of a museum Visiting Collections There’s always more to see than there’s time for. Ask to see the curator’s favorite. Or the most challenging to store. Or the…

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Museum criticism, inside and out

Museum criticism, inside and out

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(a response to the conversation at museumgeek.wordpress.com.) An important question, and you do a good job of getting at the basic challenge. Insiders pull their punches. Outsiders take potshots. Insiders have something to sell. Outsiders don’t understand the politics and the practicalities. I’ve been both a museum insider and an academic critic, sometimes both at the same time, and I’ve thought a good bit about this problem. And it is a problem: we need better, more thoughtful practice and better,…

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A rock’s story

A rock’s story

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I’ve been following closely (this may sound odd) the story of a rock. Not just any rock, and not just any story. It’s a rock on Mars, and it’s been tweeting. So, a first-person Martian rock story. You can see the whole thing here, storified. The rock is sitting happily in Gale Crater. A strange robot from another planet arrives, shoots it with a laser, and leaves. Hard to imagine how to make this interesting. But it is. The rock has…

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