Posts by Charlene Mires
We are saddened to learn of the death of Joseph J. Kelly, a valued friend and colleague in public humanities in Pennsylvania and the region. Kelly, who led the Pennsylvania Humanities Council from 1994 to 2011, died April 26 at his home in Haddonfield, New Jersey. For information about opportunities for gifts in his memory and the planned reminiscence service on May 4, visit the home page of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council or link to the article published on May 2 in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
We are pleased to invite applications for a new full-time staff position at MARCH, located in the Cooper Street Historic District on the campus of Rutgers-Camden. The primary responsibility of the Public Historian in Residence will be to serve as co-editor of The Public Historian, the journal of the National Council on Public History, in particular to provide the perspective of a public history practitioner. The person filling this position also will contribute to publications, projects, and events that support public history initiatives of MARCH and the Department of History, including mentorship of public history interns. Ideal candidates will be public history professionals with substantial experience in practice and established networks of contacts in the field. Minimum three to five years’ experience in public history practice and bachelor’s degree required (master’s degree preferred). The position requires excellent oral, written, and interpersonal communication skills, and knowledge or expertise in technology sufficient to permit participating in discussions about digital initiatives that may impact on journal publishing. To apply, submit a cover letter, resume, and list of references no later than Friday, April 19, online here. (Also link here for additional information about salary and benefits classification.)
Expanded job description:
As co-editor of The Public Historian, the Public Historian in Residence will serve as a voice for public history practice in the creation of the journal. This will include participating in editorial board meetings; remaining in contact regularly with the Editor and Managing Editor in the journal’s existing office in Santa Barbara, Calif.; providing input on projects such as special issues; reviewing submissions referred by the Managing Editor to offer assessments of their appeal and use by practicing public historians; and making suggestions for reviews of books, exhibits, and other forms of public history scholarship with an eye toward their appeal and application to public history practice. The employee will be expected to maintain currency with publications and activities in allied fields such as museum studies and practice; archives; historic preservation; and historic interpretation, and from this, to identify issues and trends for inclusion in the journal or other NCPH publications and media. The employee will recruit and nurture new authors and attend selected regional and national conferences and editorial board meetings for The Public Historian. The employee also will be involved with discussions of National Council on Public History (NCPH Digital Media Group) and maintain an awareness of the entire network of NCPH communications initiatives, such as the History@Work blog, with an eye toward potential interactions between these initiatives and the journal.
In addition, the Public Historian in Residence will contribute to publications, projects, and events promoting public history for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) and the Department of History, including administering the annual Fredric M. Miller Lecture in Public History. The person in this position also will provide mentorship for students in public history internships, including assisting in identifying internship placements; monitoring and responding to work logs; and advising on project plans.
The editorial team of The Public Historian, the leading journal in the field of public history, will grow this spring to include a co-editor and two international consulting editors. The National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) have signed an agreement with Rutgers University-Camden, which is creating a new staff position at MARCH for a Public Historian in Residence whose primary responsibility will be to serve as The Public Historian co-editor. At the same time, NCPH and UCSB are pleased to welcome Manon Perry and Paul Knevel as international consulting editors for the journal. Watch for additional information about this expansion in March on this news page and in the NCPH Public History News.
This fall, graduate students at Rutgers-Camden will create a newsletter-style Public History Year in Review for 2012 in Philadelphia, southeastern Pennsylvania, and South Jersey. The project will be published online, and partners will have the option of co-publishing the essays in their own newsletters or web sites. If your organization would like to have a project included on the assignment list, please send a brief description and contact information for a person who is willing to be interviewed to: Charlene Mires, cmires@camden.rutgers.edu. Please share your assignment offers prior to Tuesday, September 4.
This year for the Fredric M. Miller Memorial Lecture in Public History, we are pleased to provide a forum for discussion of libraries and technology, focusing especially on the project to create a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Our speaker will be John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School, and Chair of the Steering Committee, Digital Public Library of America. His lecture, “Building the Digital Public Library of America,” will be followed by a commentary, “The Digital Library in Physical Space,” by Amanda French of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. The event will begin at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 8, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, and a reception will follow the program. Please register in advance by visiting: http://miller2012.eventbrite.com/.
In the MARCH tradition of forming powerful collaborations, we are working on an exciting new project, “Backgrounder,” which will provide journalists with links to historical background information, delivered via Twitter. This is part of the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia project, and we’re working on the new initiative with WHYY, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Temple University Libraries Special Collections Center. Through the Twitter feed, we will be able to connect journalists with the great wealth of historical resources in our region.
You can help us shape this project and earn funding for it by adding your feedback to the project proposal, which is posted in the Knight News Challenge. Don’t delay – the contest deadline is March 17. You may also follow this project on Twitter.
Heading to Baltimore next week for the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference? If so, please join us on Monday, October 10, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. for “Museums and Scholarship: Creating Collaborations for Cutting-Edge Content.” This will be a roundtable discussion of the benefits and challenges of collaborations across professional cultures. We are also seeking advice for topics and formats for a new staff seminar series that MARCH will launch within the coming year. What areas of history are of greatest interest for your staff and forthcoming programs? What forms of collaboration with scholars would be most effective? Please bring your ideas and help us chart the future – see you in Baltimore!
The New York Metro American Studies Association has chosen the theme of “Memory” for our annual conference. Memory operates on a number of registers: What do we choose to remember? What do we chose to forget? Who is the “we” that is remembering or forgetting? How do public commemorations create, and transform our narratives of the past? What is the relationship between history, memory, and heritage? What is the role of “the public” is shaping the commemorative process, especially when trauma is involved? Are the contours of some events or memories untellable, unknowable? How does history gets used, even invented, as a narrative, to justify actions and to make history? How do personal memory and public memory merge and diverge?
MARCH will have a presence at several Mid-Atlantic and national conferences this fall. Each of the panels we have organized seeks to encourage conversations among practitioners of public humanities in many settings, from museums and historic sites to universities and private consulting firms. Please join us!
We begin at the American Association for State and Local History on Sept. 17 in Richmond, Va., with a session titled “The Bicentennial Impact: Legacies of Commemoration.” This panel, intended to encourage reflection on current commemorations of the Civil War, looks back to 1976 from the perspectives of Barbara Silberman, museum consultant; Ajena Rogers of the National Park Service; and Todd Bennett of East Carolina University. Also ahead this fall:
- Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums, Oct. 9-12, Baltimore: At a roundtable session on Oct. 10, join MARCH advisory council members Shan Holt, director of the Sandy Spring Museum, and V. Chapman-Smith of the National Archives to explore the issues of “Museums and Scholarship: Creating Collaborations for Cutting-Edge Content.” In addition to sharing valuable practical advice, the participants in this session will help to shape the new MARCH staff seminars project, which will match scholars with the needs of museums and historic sites.
- Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association, Nov. 3-5, Philadelphia: At this conference we encourage attention to the characteristics of the Mid-Atlantic region with the session “In Search of a Mid-Atlantic Culture.” Two sessions in the urban culture area of the conference will invite participation in shaping the popular culture content of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, a MARCH-based project.
For more information and registration for these and other conferences, visit our conference calendar (right). For those in the Philadelphia area, also look for new programs in the Greater Philadelphia Roundtable series, listed on the web site for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
September 16 is the proposals deadline for Museums in Conversation, to be held April 22-24, 2012, in Albany, N.Y. The conference theme is “How Do We (Re)Vision Our Museums?” Link here for proposal information.
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