Public History
Faculty throughout the History Department are engaged in Public
History practice to varying degrees. UMass faculty members have
sat on the boards of local museums and historical societies, served
as consultants on exhibits and documentaty films, contributed their
expertise to public policy analysis, and an array of other such
activities. Our program, however, is primarily guided by Professors
Marla Miller and David Glassberg (see below), whose research, writing
and professional activities have long encompassed and emphasized
the special concerns of Public Historians.
Public History Faculty
Marla Miller
Director, Public History Program, and Associate Professor
Office: Herter 609
Telephone: (413) 545-4256
Fax: (413) 545-6137
E-mail: mmiller@history.umass.edu
Research Interests and Professional Activities:
Though Professor Miller's primary research interest is U.S. women's
work before industrialization, over the course of her career she
has worked in museums, preservation agencies, and archives, and
continues to consult with a wide variety of historical organizations.
Her teaching interests extend to the Introduction to Public History,
American Material Culture, and Museum and Historic Site Interpretation,
as well as independent studies in Archives and Historic Preservation.
David Glassberg
Professor
Office: Herter 608
Telephone: (413) 545-4252
Fax: (413) 545-6137
E-mail: glassberg@history.umass.edu
Research Interests and Professional Activities:
Professor Glassberg's research concerns the history of popular historical
consciousness in America as represented in politics, culture, and
the environment. Among his publications are American Historical
Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century
(1990), and Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American
Life (2001).
Jon Olsen
Assistant Professor
Office: Herter 609
Telephone: (413) 545-6767
Fax: (413) 545-6137
E-mail: jon@history.umass.edu
Personal Homepage http://people.umass.edu/jon
Research Interests and Professional Activities:
Memory and historical consciousness in Modern Germany, especially the role of monuments, museums, and commemorations in East Germany. His dissertation, which he completed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004 and is currently under revision, is titled "Tailoring Truth: Memory Culture and State Legitimacy in East Germany." Professor Olsen teaches courses on German and European history, but also offer courses on digital history, comparative memory, and other areas of public history. Before coming to UMass, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at George Mason University and worked at the Center for History and New Media as the editor of an e-learning Website commemorating the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989).
Allied Faculty
Faculty across the UMass Campus and throughout the
Five Colleges contribute to our Public History curriculum. Students
regularly take courses with faculty in other departments, work with
them on special projects, and read with them for exams. Some faculty
whose interests are most closely related to our program's include:
Max Page
Adjunct Assistant Professor of History
Assistant Professor of Art
Telephone: (413) 545-6952
E-mail: mpage@art.umass.edu
Degree: Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (1995).
Field(s) of interest: Modern U.S., urban, architectural, and public
history.
Professor Page is the author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan,
1900-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which is the winner
of the 2001 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural
Historians. He is coeditor of Constructing America: American Writings
on Architecture, Urbanism, and Place, 1789 to the Present (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and coeditor of Giving Preservation
a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States
(projected, 2002). He is also involved in a number of public history
projects including the development of the Henry Luce III Center
for American Culture at the New-York Historical Society.
Kevin Sweeney
Professor of History and American Studies, Amherst College
Telephone: (413) 542-5371
E-mail:kmsweeney@amherst.edu
Kevin Sweeney came to Amherst College in 1989 after working for
almost a decade in history museums. Trained as a colonial historian
at Yale (Ph.D. in 1986), he teaches courses on colonial North American
history, the era of the American Revolution, early American material
culture and architecture, and Native American histories as well
as American Studies departmental courses. His research and writing
has focused on the history and material culture of seventeenth and
eighteenth-century New England.
Cathy Stanton
Adjunct Research Associate
Degree: Ph.D., Tufts University (2004) Fields of interest: Public history, tourism, museums, commemoration, myth and ritual, cultural performance. Cathy Stanton is a cultural anthropologist who studies the uses of the past in contemporary life, particularly in the U.S. Her 2006 book, "The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City" (University of Massachusetts Press) won the National Council on Public History Book Award. She has served as a consultant to the National Park Service for many years, and is currently working on a study for Salem Maritime National Historic Site of the Polish-American community in Salem, Massachusetts.
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