Tag Archive

scholarship

The short, intriguing career of Public History Ryan Gosling

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~ Annie Cullen and Rachel Boyle, graduate students in Public History at Loyola University Chicago, are the creators of Public History Ryan Gosling, a blog that pairs the popular “Hey Girl” meme with public history theory.  The project has reached over 60,000 people and stimulated meaningful conversation in various corners of the Internet.  Read More

Independent Research for the Independent Consultant Part 2: Making Your Clients’ Interests Your Research Interests

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In Part I, I talked about balancing your consulting work with your own research work. Setting aside the fact that pursuing your own research in addition to your consulting work may throw the rest of your life out of kilter, you will have to assign a rather high priority to your own research—after your clients’ needs, of course—if you want it to come to fruition in the form of publications. Read More

Fail better? Failure and public history

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black and white arrowsI’ve been thinking about failure and public history. Failure—and mistakes more generally—aren’t concepts we like to consider. The word is intertwined with feelings of shame and humiliation, private emotions which are the antithesis of the public nature of public history. Many people’s impulse is to hide failure or “spin” it, the clichéd strategy of “making lemons out of lemonade.” Read More

Independent research for the independent consultant, Part 1: Making time

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Prompted by Adina Langer, my colleague on the NCPH Consultants Committee and one of the editors of this blog, I am going to relate how I have pursued a research agenda independently of my work for clients. Admittedly, my career as a historical consultant has been somewhat eclectic, but I hope that you may find at least some of what I have to say applicable to your own situation. Read More

Help wanted: Thoughts on the recent boom in academic public history jobs

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people looking aheadIn recent years, the number of tenure track academic jobs in history has dropped to some of the lowest levels in 25 years. In response, Anthony Grafton, James Grossman and Jesse Lemisch have suggested that historians shift their attentions outside of the ivory tower, with Grafton and Grossman encouraging PhDs to get jobs in public history and Lemisch calling for historians to create new public history opportunities. Read More

Reflecting on Texts: Steven Lubar on Trouillot's "Silencing the Past"

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NOTE:  This post is part of a new and, we hope, semi-regular series in which public history educators share insights and observations about their use of “classic” texts in the public history classroom.

Michel Rolph Trouillot, historian, anthropologist, Haitian intellectual and University of Chicago professor, died in July at age 63Read More

What "counts" as a public history dissertation? Some views from the field

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stack of booksAs I approach my second year of doctoral studies in history, I find myself thinking often about dissertation topics. These ruminations may be premature. General exams have not even clouded my horizon yet. Still, I feel a special burden to choose topics wisely because I hope to secure an academic job teaching in a public history program. Read More

Project Showcase: Nursing Clio

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Nursing Clio is a collaborative blog project that ties historical scholarship to present-day political, social, and cultural issues surrounding gender and medicine. Men’s and women’s bodies, their reproductive rights, and their health care are often at the center of political debate and have also become a large part of the social and cultural discussions in popular media. Read More

Letters from Chile: A dead dictator's homage, a public history movement (Part 2)

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/continued from Part I

At the outset of this series, I proposed two seemingly simple questions in hopes of unpacking the complexity of sites of memory and how they “engage citizens in human rights issues” vis-à-vis the past.  What type of historic work is taking place?  Read More