Professional opportunities June 19, 2013

Posted on June 19, 2013 by cathy

ANNCT: New community website for digital historians: join or start a group at Digital Historians.

ANNCT: National Coalition for History moves into social media realm with Facebook and Twitter

CFP: Papers on travel and tourism for MAPACA (Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Assn.) , Nov. 7-9, 2013, Atlantic City, New Jersey, U.S.
DEADLINE: June 30, 2013

CFP: Chapters on “autobiography and trauma” and “gender and trauma” for edited collection on Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives
DEADLINE: June 30, 2013

CFP: Historical Justice and Memory: Questions of Rights and Accountability in Contemporary Society, second annual conference of Columbia University’s Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability/Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory Network, Dec. 5-7, 2013, New York, New York, U.S.
DEADLINE: Sept. 5, 2013

CFP: The Archaeological Review seeks multidisciplinary contributions for its Archive Issue (November 2014)
DEADLINE: Oct. 30, 2013

CFP: Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory, July 10-11, 2014, London, U.K.
DEADLINE: Nov. 30, 2013

EDU: 4-week Museum Microclimates online course from Northern States Conservation Center begins July 1

EDU: Collections Camp: Costume and Textiles workshop from American Assn. for State and Local History, Kingston, Rhode Island, U.S. July 24-26, 2013
EARLY REGISTRATION by June 19, 2013

EDU: E-Workshop: Getting Started with Oral History from Baylor University Institute for Oral History, Aug. 7 and 14, 2013

FUNDING: New funding opportunities from U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities for media, historical, and cultural projects and organizations

America’s Media Makers: Development and Production Grants
America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations Planning and Implementation Grants

DEADLINE: August 14, 2013

REV: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe (Kattago)

Looking toward Monterey: NCPH’s 2014 Call for Proposals

Posted on May 24, 2013 by cathy

“Sustainable Public History”
2014 Annual Meeting, National Council on Public History
Monterey, California, March 19–22, 2014

Call for Proposals

Irrigating fields north of Monterey. (Photo: Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious) Fresh water is an increasingly scarce resource in California as in much of the American West.

In 2014 the National Council on Public History will meet at the Monterey Conference Center. Monterey is one of California’s most naturally beautiful and historically rich cities. The Conference Center is adjacent to the original Presidio of Monterey, founded in 1776. And it’s a short walk to historic Colton Hall, site of the signing of California’s first constitution. A paved bayside recreation trail leads to Cannery Row with its shops, galleries, IMAX Theatre, restaurants, clubs and the spectacular Monterey Bay Aquarium. Monterey is a city where nature and culture intersect in fascinating and challenging ways, an ideal place to explore issues of sustainability.

The program committee invites panel, roundtable, workshop, working group, and individual paper proposals for the conference. The Call for Poster sessions will be issued in fall 2013.

The Call for Proposals closes July 15, 2013.

At its core, sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future. Sustainability requires us to work within limited economic and natural resources, build lasting community and cross-disciplinary relationships, emphasize quality over quantity, and elevate social responsibility. The idea of sustainability is often applied to our relationship with the environment, but also relates to the way we manage and fund historic resources. This conference will examine how the idea of sustainability can advance the field of public history and, in turn, how public history can encourage sustainability. Questions to consider include:

How can we use history to promote a better relationship with the environment?
How can we ensure that our own work is sustainable and that the collections, institutions, and knowledge we build today will endure for generations?
Recognizing that disparities of wealth and power undermine sustainability, how can we use history to ensure social justice?
How can public historians connect local actions to global developments, particularly around processes like climate change or economic decline and redevelopment?
How can our work inform vital public debate on these processes?

Some ideas for sessions include:

Interpreting the history of energy resources and their use, climate change, global warming, consumption, transportation, and the material culture of waste and reuse
Sustainable food – historic foodways and local food culture, historic farming practices and modern agriculture, farmers’ markets, community gardening
Preserving and interpreting historical resources in an era of climate change and limited resources, including resources that have themselves altered the environment
The role of historic organizations and preservation in sustainable planning or rebuilding – how are historic communities rebuilding after hurricanes and other disasters? How should municipalities manage use of waterfronts, flood plains, or areas susceptible to drought, etc.?
Reuse of historic buildings, issues of integrity, and the relationship between “green” architecture and historic preservation
Developing and interpreting the heritage aspects of recreational trails and environmental preserves
Graduate education: What do graduate students need to know about sustainability? Is the proliferation of graduate programs sustainable?
Incorporating public history into university-based sustainability centers or councils
Understanding sustainability issues in digital history projects
Cultivating and sustaining community engagement relationships
The impact of heritage tourism on communities and the natural environment
Race relations – neighborhood segregation and connections to environmental justice on the Monterey Peninsula and elsewhere
Creative ways to sustain heritage institutions; finding new audiences and new funding sources
Diversifying the public history profession

For more on types of sessions and guidelines for developing your proposal, visit the NCPH website.

If you have questions, please contact the program committee co-chairs or the NCPH program manager.

2014 Program Committee Co-Chairs
Briann Greenfield, History Department, Central Connecticut State University
Leah Glaser, History Department, Central Connecticut State University

NCPH Program Manager
Stephanie Rowe

The telephonic heart: A “machine autopsy” in Ottawa

Posted on May 6, 2013 by cathy

This spring, I’ve been teaching an urban anthropology class at Tufts University. In the class session before I left for the National Council on Public History conference, we talked about how digital technologies have become ever more interwoven with urban experience. The session before that was on sites of urban violence and memorialization. Although the course has a global focus, I frequently use Boston as a case study, since that’s where we are. We talked about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 and the Cocoanut Grove Fire of 1942 and—because Marathon Weekend was coming up—about how people interact digitally with urban spectacles, including sports, and how the layers of memory embedded in iconic places and sports events filter into our contemporary uses and understandings of them.

Then I went to Ottawa for the conference and, like many people there, ended up fixated on something between a disaster movie and a cops-and-robbers drama unfolding at a distance, mostly via my Facebook feed on my iPhone. Mobile phones were not only a way to keep up with the story of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, but part and parcel of the story itself, with spectators’ cell-phone photos and video circulating virally once the suspects in the bombing were pinpointed. Throughout the day when much of the city was on “lockdown,” I was receiving text alerts from Tufts telling me how to “shelter in place.” Everything we’d been covering in my class was playing out on my phone’s tiny screen almost simultaneously with the actual events in Boston.

So there was a lot to talk about when I went back to class the following Monday. And all of it made Vittorio Marchis’ dissection of a telephone at the conference particularly fascinating for me. Continue reading →

Professional opportunities April 25, 2013

Posted on April 25, 2013 by cathy

CFP: “Contact and Connections”: Travel and Mobility Studies Symposium, June 27, 2013, University of Warwick, U.K.
EXTENDED DEADLINE: May 1, 2013

CFP: “The Politics and Practices of Urban Renewal”
DEADLINE: May 15, 2013

CFP: “The Office as an Interior (1880-1960),” Oct. 17-18, 2013, Bern, Switzerland
DEADLINE: May 31, 2013

CFP: “Sweat Equity Investment in the Cotton Kingdom” Symposium and Cotton Pickers Ball, Oct. 16-17, 2013, Itta Bena, Mississippi, U.S.
DEADLINE: Sept. 6, 2013

CONF: 3rd Annual Public History Community Forum (PubComm), April 26, 2013, Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
FREE REGISTRATION

CONF: Materiality: objects and idioms in historical studies of science and technology, May 3-4, 2013, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

CONF: Pennsylvania Statewide Conference on Heritage, July 16-19, 2013, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.

EDU: Digital Directions: Fundamentals of Creating and Managing Digital Collections, July 21-23, 2013, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
EARLY BIRD DEADLINE: April 30, 2013

EDU: Establishing a Museum – online course from Northern States Conservation Center begins May 6

FUNDING: Charlton Oral History Research Grant
DEADLINE: June 21, 2013.

FUNDING: Grant for sustainability initiative at a California museum
DEADLINE: June 28, 2013

REV: Seeing Culture Everywhere, from Genocide to Consumer Habits (Breidenbach and Nyíri)

REV: The Battle of the Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn: Custer’s Last Stand in Memory, History, and Popular Culture (Buchholtz)

Queenston on and off the field: A Q&A discussion with Adam Shoalts and Cathy Stanton

Posted on April 24, 2013 by cathy

Reenactors at the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Queenston Heights. Image courtesy of Andrew Amy.

Editors’ note: This conversation responds to Adam Shoalts’ report on the October 2012 bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Queenston Heights and is part of the collaborative coverage of War of 1812 commemoration in History@Work and The Public Historian. Read more here.

Stanton: Your piece really captures the playfulness and sense of adventure and discovery that reenactments often offer to participants. Yet at the same time, “officialdom” of various kinds is usually involved in staging a big event like this. How much of the success of this event, for you, was due to the more improvisational moments (like your exploration of the cliff path or your infantry partner’s impulsive firing at “Brock”) and how much resulted from the more scripted and managed aspects of the day?

Shoalts: While it is true that I am a former employee of the government agency that oversees Queenston Heights and that I have been involved with quite a number of reenactments, I confess that much of the higher planning that goes into staging these events remains a mystery to me. Continue reading →

2013 Lightning Talks

Posted on April 22, 2013 by cathy

There actually was a thunderstorm with lightning on Thursday night in Ottawa–it’s been an unsettled spring here, as in much of the northeast. The lightning on Friday, though, came in the form of a set of quick presentations at the NCPH conference on recent and emerging digital public history projects. This year’s “Lightning Talk” projects included:

“London Works: Labouring in the Forest City” at the Museum of London (Ontario). Students from Western University showed an image (at top) of a component of the exhibit that they’d worked on, a single case containing 150 unlabeled work-related objects. Visitors could learn more through a tablet version of the image, geo-tagged to the specific objects. Continue reading →

3D printers and tweeting lobsters: NCPH 2013 is underway

Posted on April 18, 2013 by cathy

The public history twitterverse is an ever-livelier place, to the point that the relative absence of public historians (as at this year’s Organization of American Historians conference, held jointly with the National Council on Public History last spring but separately this year) correlates to a sharp decline in social media traffic, as David Austin Walsh reported last week.

For those not following the Twitter feed for #ncph2013, here’s a quick selection of tweeted thoughts from the first day, which featured a number of workshops and working groups and the third THATCamp NCPH. Even from afar, it’s pretty easy to tell that Devon Elliott’s 3D printer was the star of the day! Continue reading →

NCPH 2013 Individual Consulting Award: What ethnography brings to public history

Posted on April 2, 2013 by cathy

Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Cathy Stanton, winner of the 2013 NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award in the individual category for “Plant Yourself in My Neighborhood: An Ethnographic Landscape Study of Farming and Farmers in Columbia County, New York.”

In 2009, Martin Van Buren National Historic Site expanded its boundaries beyond the eighth President’s post-Presidential mansion to encompass his 200+ acre farm as well. This change meant that the national park found itself in a working relationship with a modern farm that was cultivating much of the acreage. The park had previously commissioned other studies to help support its shift toward interpreting Van Buren as a gentleman farmer as well as a politician, but the Ethnographic Landscape Study [PDF] that I was hired to produce was somewhat different. It needed to connect more directly with the present day, including the contemporary agricultural economy of Columbia County, New York, where the park is located, as well as with the burgeoning “local food” movement that the farm is part of. I jumped at the chance to work on this project and found it enormously satisfying because it gave me a chance to put into practice a notion that I’d been talking about for several years around the public history community: namely, that cultural anthropology offers an extremely useful set of tools for public historians as they work with living communities and try to articulate the importance of a sense of history in the contemporary world. Continue reading →

Hey girl, let’s meet in Ottawa and get public

Posted on March 29, 2013 by cathy

You may have noticed by now that Public History Ryan Gosling has been reappearing in select locations. His handlers, Rachel Boyle and Anne Cullen, will be presenting a paper on last year’s PHRG phenomenon as part of a panel on “Connecting Communities” at the National Council on Public History meeting in Ottawa next month, and we’ve been very happy to have their help for some advance conference promotion. (You can get a preview of their presentation ideas here.)

PHRG won’t be the only live-tweeter at the conference, and this panel is just one of many (along with some special sessions and events) focusing on the digital dimensions of public history practice. Below is a round-up of what’s happening: Continue reading →

Memorializing without change? Hurricane Sandy at the World Trade Center

Posted on November 12, 2012 by cathy

Michael Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” fountain in the footprint of the North Tower at Ground Zero, New York. Photo: Kai Brinker (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kbrinker/6156711439/in/photostream/)

Was I the only one who noticed this? There was an eerie similarity between Michael Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” memorial in the footprint of the Twin Towers and the virally-circulating AP photo of seawater rushing into the foundations of new skyscrapers at the World Trade Center construction site during Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge last week. “Something powerful about this image,” one tweet noted. “Zeitgeist moment.”

John Minchillo’s photo for AP circulated virally during the height of the storm.

To my eye, the picture’s resonance came from the troubling layers of meaning and memory within the World Trade Center complex. The site reflects both the broadest extensions of American economic and technological power and the ways that that power has been spectacularly rebuked in recent years, both by those who have pushed back against the U.S.’s political and military presence in so many other parts of the world and–increasingly–by a planetary ecology saturated with the by-products of two hundred years of industrialism.

And yet we continue to build and rebuild, extending our reach outward and upward even as we’re also creating spectacular memorials to some of the most striking costs of our own power. Those parallel processes–commemorating without any real intention of changing direction–are what I see when I look at these two images together, and it makes me wonder, not for the first time, about how memorials can close off thought and memory as well as provoking them. Last week, it almost seemed to me that the hurricane itself was trying to underscore that point.

~ Cathy Stanton

History@Work

A public history commons sponsored by the National Council on Public History

Author Archives: cathy