I taught in the Public Humanities program at Brown University from 2004 until 2025. My course incuded the introduction and methods in public humanities courses, for graduate students. I also taught many courses on museum topics, includding collections, exhibitions, and museum history. Starting about 2018, I started to teach courses on making and skill, at the Brown Design Workshop. (You can see many of the syllabi here.)

• Teaching with ChatGPTMarch 5, 2023
  [a short presentation to a Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning workshop on how teachers might deal with chatbots] I believe that ChatGPT is a new and useful tool and that we should try to teach students how to use it. But we should teach them to use it as… Read more: Teaching with ChatGPT
• Books, Material and DigitalAugust 15, 2021
  A mashup of a course: book history, material and digital explorations, and making. This past semester (Summer, 2021) I taught a course titled “Books, Material and Digital,” a course that combined book history, hands-on making, and explorations of libraries, reading, and digital scholarship. (Kristen Iemma co-taught as TA.) Designed originally… Read more: Books, Material and Digital
• Exhibition How-to VideosOctober 25, 2020
  Remote teaching this fall meant figuring how to reduce in-class lectures, and so I recorded some of the talks I would normally give in class. And once recorded – why not share them? What you’ll find here are short talks about how to do exhibits. They are aimed at students… Read more: Exhibition How-to Videos
• Paper, ink, type, booksJuly 16, 2020
  Next year I will be teaching a new course on books that combines my interest in making with my new focus on digital scholarship. This summer I worked with three Brown undergraduates (Elena Newman, Malery Nguyen, and Mara Jovanovic) to invent the course, and especially to think about hands-on projects.… Read more: Paper, ink, type, books
• BoatbuildingJuly 12, 2020
  In Fall semester 2019 I co-taught a course called Boatbuilding: Design, Making, and Culture, with Chris Bull and Shep Shapiro. Here’s the description: This course introduces the study of the design, engineering, work, material culture and history through the construction of a traditional workboat, a Maine peapod. As the class… Read more: Boatbuilding
• Teaching SkillJanuary 14, 2018
  In the Fall semester, I taught a new course, a seminar for first-year students: “Skills: From the Medieval Workshop to the Maker Movement.” It was historical and hands-on: I wanted students to understand skills by reading and writing as well as by doing. We read history, psychology, and anthropology; manifestos,… Read more: Teaching Skill
• Learners choose learning outcomesSeptember 7, 2017
  Last year, I asked students in my Introduction to Public Humanities course to write the syllabus. I wrote about this here: you won’t believe what happened next! I didn’t repeat that project this year. In part, that’s because of different circumstances: teaching the fall, not the spring, means that students… Read more: Learners choose learning outcomes
• I asked students to write the syllabus. You won’t believe what happened next.January 26, 2017
  Yesterday was the first day of the new semester, and the first day of “Introduction to Public Humanities.” I’ve taught this course most years since I established the public humanities program twelve years ago. It’s the theory half of the introductory courses, paired with “Methods in Public Humanities.” It’s usually taught in the… Read more: I asked students to write the syllabus. You won’t believe what happened next.
• “Collecting and Collections” course & stamp exhibitApril 3, 2016
  Head over to the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities blog for a post Sarah Dylla and I wrote about our course last semester, AMST1510, Museum Collecting and Collections. And head over to the John Hay Library where you can see the course exhibition, Thousands of Little Colored Windows: Brown University’s Stamp Collections.… Read more: “Collecting and Collections” course & stamp exhibit
• A class about collectionsOctober 31, 2015
  We’re halfway through the semester, and my collections class is deep into the stamp exhibition project. I’m teaching a course titled “Museum Collecting and Collections.” There are three projects: the Brown University’s Library extensive stamp collections the paintings that came to Brown with the Annmary Brown Memorial, and scientific instruments scattered across… Read more: A class about collections
• Trajectory [a welcome to the new class of public humanities students] 2015]September 3, 2015
  Robyn asked me to give “something like a trajectory of how we’ve come to understand ‘public humanities’ within the program’s history,” connected to the work you’ll be doing with this semester. That’s a fair assignment for me, as someone who’s been part of that trajectory. I know Robyn won’t mind… Read more: Trajectory [a welcome to the new class of public humanities students] 2015]
• Workshop with the NY Humanities Council Public Humanities FellowsAugust 19, 2015
  Earlier this week I met with the NY Council for the Humanities Public Humanities Fellows. This is a fairly new program (started by a former student, Leah Nahmias!) that connects PhD students at NY schools with local communities. The goals are ambitious: to bring humanities scholarship into the public realm,… Read more: Workshop with the NY Humanities Council Public Humanities Fellows
• Course for the fall: Introduction to Public HumanitiesJuly 25, 2015
  It’s that more-than-half-way through the summer inflection point when suddenly it seems that school starts too soon. It’s time to think about fall semester. One of my courses this fall is my usual Introduction to Public Humanities, the seminar for new MA students in the public humanities program, along with a few… Read more: Course for the fall: Introduction to Public Humanities
• For the public humanities graduatesJune 14, 2015
  Here’s what I told the graduating class. It refers back to what I told them when they arrived. Best wishes, everyone!
• Exhibit and exhibit labels workshopMarch 31, 2015
  I talked to the “Methods in Public Humanities” class today about exhibitions. A very quick overview, and didn’t even get to the how-to-write-good-labels part of the talk. Here are my presentations, on exhibits generally, and on exhibit labels, slightly cleaned up but without much in the way of notes.  
• “Museum Histories” course, Spring 2015January 9, 2015
  Here’s the syllabus for my upcoming course, AMST1903I. It’s a history of museums, mostly American, history and science as well as art. The syllabus includes links to many of the articles, but you’ll find some are behind paywalls. Any feedback welcome!
• My talk at Mt. Holyoke: Looking Back and Looking AheadOctober 28, 2014
  Here are my slides and my notes from a talk I gave at Mt. Holyoke College for the (long name!) Five Colleges, Inc. / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Bridging Initiative in the Public and Applied Humanities. I greatly enjoyed the opportunity, both because writing the talk allowed me to look… Read more: My talk at Mt. Holyoke: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
• Student Work for Public AudiencesApril 4, 2014
  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… Read more: Student Work for Public Audiences
• Teaching Digital Public HistoryJanuary 2, 2014
  Here’s the paper I would have given at the American Historical Association conference, had it not been for about a foot of snow and a cancelled flight.
• Changing the Ph.D. for a Changing Job MarketDecember 23, 2013
  Some thoughts, kindly published by Oronte Churm at Inside Higher Education.
• One Room (The after post)September 18, 2013
  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… Read more: One Room (The after post)
• One Room (The before post)September 18, 2013
  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… Read more: One Room (The before post)
• MOOCingSeptember 9, 2013
  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 classJanuary 23, 2013
  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… Read more: Tomorrow’s the first day of class
• Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 2: Is it useful for the job?January 1, 2013
  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… Read more: Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 2: Is it useful for the job?
• Building a Professional Persona OnlineOctober 21, 2012
  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… Read more: Building a Professional Persona Online
• Digital Public Humanities (and an out-of-body experience)October 14, 2012
  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… Read more: Digital Public Humanities (and an out-of-body experience)
• Sources for Teaching Public History: Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)September 3, 2012
  (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… Read more: Sources for Teaching Public History: Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)