Work Area

Museums, Museum History, and Material Culture

I have worked in many museums. As an undergraduate I worked at the MIT Museum. In graduate school at the University of Chicago I worked at the Adler Planetarium. Back to the Boston area, I was curator at the Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1984 I was hired as a historian for the Engines of Change exhibit at the National Museum of American History, and I stayed there working on many exhibits and building collections in the history of technology for about twenty years. At Brown, I taught many courses about museums and museum history and was director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. I continue to do museum consulting, too, from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Now, my exhibit work is mostly at the Little Compton Historical Sociey.

book cover of "Inside the Lost Museum"
Published by Harvard University Press, 2017. Buy a copy today!

Writing on museums and museum history

  • Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)
  • Guest co-editor, Museum History Review, for special issue on lost museums, ed. with Lukas Rieppel, Kate Duffy and Ann Daly, January 2017.
  • Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian, with Kathleen Kendrick (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001) 
  • Guest co-editor, The Public Historian, for special issue on industrial history museum, ed. with Stephen Cutcliffe, Summer 2000
  • History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. with W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993)
  • “‘Relicts’ and ‘A ton of significant Attitude’: History at Museums and Universities,” Organization of American Historians Newsletter, August 1991 
  • “Exhibiting Memories,” in Museum News, July/August 1996
  • “What Do We Keep?” in American Heritage of Invention and Technology 1999 14 (4): 28-31, 34-38 (with Peter Liebhold)
  • “The Challenge of Industrial History Museums,” with Stephen H. Cutcliffe, guest editors’ introduction to theme issue of The Public Historian 2000 22 (3): 11-24 
  • “Industrial Museums: Artifacts and Stories,” in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on History of Technology, (United Nations University, Tokyo, 2004)
  • “Curator as Auteur,” The Public Historian, 36, February 2014
  • “Looking through the Skiascope: Benjamin Ives Gilman and the Invention of the Modern Museum Gallery,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Summer 2017
  • “The Find-Me-Another Machine,” in The Museum Blog Book, 2017
  • “Cataloging History,” four-part series on Medium, 2017 (with Emily Esten)
  • “Museums need collections and connections,” Medium, 2018
  •  “Cabinets of Curiosity,” Medium, 2018
  • “Exhibiting Absence,” Medium, 2018

Selected exhibitions

  • Co-curator, “Engines of Change, The American Industrial Revolution, 1790-1860,” permanent exhibition at the National Museum of American History, 1986
  • Co-curator, “Information Age,” a permanent exhibition at the National Museum of American History, 1990
  • Curator, designer and builder, “A History of Western Montgomery County,” for Concerts in the Country and the Boyds-Clarksburg Historical Society, 1990
  • Co-curator, “Who’s in Charge: A History of Workers and Managers in the United States,” SITES traveling exhibition, 1992, and revised installation, National Museum of American History, 1996
  • Co-curator, “The Smithsonian’s America,” large temporary exhibition in Tokyo, 1994
  • Co-curator, “Images of Steel,” temporary exhibition at the National Museum of American History, 1994-1995
  • Curator and project director, “World War II: Sharing Memories,” temporary exhibition at the National Museum of American History, 1995
  • Co-curator and project director, “The Family Car,” temporary exhibition at the National Museum of American History, 1997
  • Co-curator and project director, “Communities in a Changing Nation” permanent exhibition at the National Museum of American History, 1999
  • Co-curator, “American Legacies,” permanent exhibition at the National Museum of American History, unfunded and not scheduled for production 
  • Smithsonian coordinator, National Museum of Industrial History, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1999-2004
  • Co-curator and project director, “From Turbines to Tupperware: Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian,” temporary exhibit at the Payne Gallery, Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 2001-2002
  • Co-curator and project director, “America on the Move,” permanent exhibition at the National Museum of American History, opening 2003
  • Co-curator and project director, “Doodles, Drawings, and Designs: Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian Institution Collections,” SITES traveling exhibition, 2004
  • Curator, “Facing the Museum,” Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012
  • Curator, “CultureLab,” Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 2012
  • Co-Curator, “Little Compton: A Changing Landscape,” Little Compton Historical Society, 2019
  • Co-Curator, “Everyone was a Farmer: A History of Agriculture in Little Compton,” Little Compton Historical Society, 2021
  • Project oversight, “Little Compton, Connected,” Little Compton Historical Society, 2024

Blog posts on museums and museum history

Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox:

css.php
Scroll to Top