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…
Can museums use museum history to think about the future? Can their past successes and failures guide them? How might they find possibility and potential in the past when they need to change? I suggest that one way to do this is to look to the long history of museums. Museums have been many things. They have found many ways that museums have balanced the often-conflicting needs of audience, collections, patrons, and educational goals. Looking to this history can help…
Back in April I gave a talk at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum in Norwalk, Connecticut. They’ve done a very nice exhibition about the technology of the day, focusing on some of the remarkable technologies Lockwood put into his 1864 home. My talk focused on what Lockwood and others of his generation thought about the future of technology. Lockwood was an early adopter and investor. Others were more cautious. Some rejected it, others saw utopian potential. The gimmick for the talk…
My reply to Mary Rizzo’s Jon Stewart, public historian?, and especially Erik Greenberg’s comment: Let’s think about a “big tent” definition of public historian. Limiting it to “someone grounded in the arguments, practices, and habits of mind of an academically trained historian” leaves out some of the best and most interesting work – and makes for a pretty boring field. It says, do history our way, the academic way, and then we’ll keep you in our club. What if we defined…
We’re submitting a planning grant to the NEH for a new program that will link Providence’s creative past with its creative future. Here’s a summary: The Brown Center for Public Humanities seeks $34,100 to cover the costs of planning and testing a series of pop-up installations and events that tie Providence’s past as a locus of invention and entrepreneurship to its future as a “Creative Capital” of art- and science-based innovation. The project brings museums and humanists together with artists,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(written for the History@Work blog and published there September 4, 2012) Michel Rolph Trouillot, historian, anthropologist, Haitian intellectual and University of Chicago professor, died this July at age 63. I first learned of his death on Twitter, from the tweets by several of my students. They had read his Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in my class, and it had stuck with them. Silencing the Past is the only book that has been on my syllabus every…
