December 14, 2016

REQUEST FOR APPLICATIONS, INTERNATIONAL CONSULTING EDITORS

The National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Department of History seek proposals from non-US public history scholars to serve as international consulting editors for The Public Historian, a journal of public history.

Background and Context

The publishing partners wish to enhance the international scope of The Public Historian and its digital presence.

The Public Historian, the definitive voice of the public history profession and the flagship journal in the field, was founded in 1978, two years after the UCSB Department of History founded the discipline with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to train historians for public and private sector careers beyond conventional academic employment. The journal, the official publication of NCPH, has been edited at Santa Barbara ever since and is published by the University of California Press.  A quarterly print and electronic publication (on HighWire), the journal provides historians with the latest scholarship and applications from the field and serves as one of the primary benefits to NCPH’s 1,600+ members. More than four hundred college and university libraries carry institutional subscriptions. The audience for the journal is comprised of practicing public historians working inside and outside of the academy.

The current editorial team includes the editor, who is a faculty member in the UCSB Department of History (with course release support), a co-editor at Rutgers University–Camden’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (a supporting institution for the journal), a managing editor and a graduate student assistant review editor (both on the UCSB campus), and a book review editor (with course release support; this position is not tied to a specific campus). NCPH itself is headquartered at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The editorial office is advised by the journal’s editorial board, which is appointed by the NCPH president in consultation with the editorial office.

Public history—as a scholarly field and as a profession—is booming, as membership in NCPH has grown by twenty-five percent in just three years. In the interest of continuing to expand our content and network beyond the US, four years ago we appointed two international consulting editors. These editors served ably for two terms, and we now seek new voices. We aim for consulting editors who will aid us in expanding the international scope of The Public Historian by alerting us to international exhibits, locating international reviewers, recruiting authors from conferences abroad, and connecting us with global trends in public history. The ideal consulting editors will aid us in broadening our publication’s appeal, while preserving and strengthening its role as the journal of record for public historians, both academic and non-academic, in the United States and internationally.

Letters of interest are due January 10, 2017 and the start date is March 1, 2017. The term is two years, with one chance to renew. For more information, see the RFP.