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…
I’m about to start my gig at Office Hours, the RISD Museum program “where invited artists, designers, performers, and other community members creatively curate, teach, and experiment through a variety of participatory events.” That’s the official description. In the publicity, it’s “artists, designers, experts, and brainiacs.” I’m not sure what category I’m in: I guess safest to say “other community members.” I was flattered to be asked, of course, especially since a former student was running the program. But what…
My post on my summer of being a student, and watching students work as professionals, is up on the Public Humanities Center blog.
Tomorrow’s the first day of AMST1550, Methods in Public Humanities. I’ve finished the third version of the syllabus today – I’ve claimed I was done back in November, and then again about two weeks ago. Until the course seems real – until I see the list of students signed up – it’s hard for me to pin down what the course should be. The goal of the course is to give students a quick background across many areas of the…
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…
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…
