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Public History FacultyFaculty 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.
Office: Herter 704 Research Interests and Professional Activities:
Research Interests and Professional Activities: Public History Allied FacultyFaculty 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:
Joyce Avrech Berkman Telephone: ((413) 545-6759 Joyce Berkman welcomes interested students to participate with her in a variety of her regular public history undertakings -- consulting for theater companies, conducting workshops for K-12 teachers, undertaking and supervising oral history projects, co-directing the five college faculty/graduate student oral history seminar and serving the Valley Women's History Collaborative, of which she is a founder, until recently its director and now treasurer and oral history coordinator. She offers a combined advanced undergraduate and graduate course in oral history.
Madeleine H. Blais Telephone: (413) 545-5924 Degree: M.S., Columbia University MADELEINE BLAIS, professor, earned a bachelor’s degree at the College of New Rochelle in 1969 and a master’s from the School of Journalism at Columbia University in 1970. She was a reporter for the Boston Globe, the Trenton Times, and Tropic Magazine of the Miami Herald from 1979-87. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing while at the Miami Herald. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in class of 1986. She has written for the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Northeast Magazine in the Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Nieman Reports, Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe, and San Jose Mercury News. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1995), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN; The Heart Is an Instrument; Portraits in Journalism (1992); and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family (2001), honored with a Massachusetts Book Award. She is a member of the advisory board for Goucher College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction and she serves on the editorial boards of Riverteeth and Doubletake: Points of Entry. Professor Blais is the writing advisor for students applying for postgraduate fellowships such as the Rhodes and serves as Journalism’s honors coordinator. Her courses include The Art of the Profile, Literature and Film in the Documentary Tradition, and Diaries, Memoirs and Journals. There are honors components to all her classes. Robert S. Cox Telephone: (413) 545-6842 Rob Cox has an interest in the history of the early national period and 19th century America, with an emphasis on both religion and history of science. As Head of the Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) in the Library, he teaches courses in archival management at both UMass and the Graduate School of Library Studies at Simmons College, and is glad to work with students on independent study or internship projects in history, varieties of digital history, or archival studies. SCUA is interested in assisting local and regional historical societies in collections management and would be glad to involve students in its efforts. Mark Hamin Telephone: (413) 545-6608 Degree: Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania Lecturer in Regional Planning. B.A. History and B.A. Philosophy, Brown University; Ph.D. History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. Instructor for Reg Pl 651: Planning History and Theory; (Fall 2003) Env Des 140: Awareness of the Physical Environment; (Spring 2003) Env Des 205: Dynamics of Human Habitations; (Fall 2002) Reg Pl 693A: Research Methods; and (Spring 2002) Reg Pl 692h: Technology and Urban (Re)Form. Previous teaching as Temporary Assistant Professor in Community and Regional Planning at Iowa State University and Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. Special research interests include: urban infrastructural and technological history; social-cultural perspectives on environmental risk, security, and 'quality of life' in cities; and changing food ecologies/economies.
Laetitia La Follette Telephone: (413) 545-0634 Laetitia La Follette joined the Art History faculty in 1987. Educated at Harvard-Radcliffe (B.A. in Classics) and Princeton University (MA, PhD, Art and Archaeology), she specializes in the physical culture of the ancient Mediterranean and regularly offers courses on Greek Art, Roman Art and Topical Seminars in the ancient field. A secondary interest in computer applications for the teaching of Art History has led to a regularly scheduled seminar Art History and Cybertechnology. As Director of "A History of Art for the 21st Century ", a collaborative venture involving departmental and Five College colleagues, she has overseen and contributed as co-author to seven multimedia online modules which help students master skills and learn basic concepts for introductory surveys of art history. The project is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE). She has published in the areas of architectural history, epigraphy and Roman costume and recently initiated a new project on Roman urbanism in Southern France.
Laura L. Lovett Telephone: (413) 545-6778 Laura L. Lovett is an Associate Professor in the Department of History specializing in twentieth century U.S. Women's History and the History of Childhood and Youth. Her research has explored the intersections of history and public policies concerning eugenics, child health, education, and housing. She has also involved in public history projects on local women's history from the past 50 years. Professor Lovett would be happy to talk with students interested in the intersections between 20th century U.S. public history and policy and to advise students wishing to complete a certificate track with an emphasis on public policy and/or 20th century U.S. History.
Max Page Telephone: (413) 545-6952 Degree: Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (1995).
Robert Paynter Telephone: (413) 545-2658 I study historical archaeology, something I think of as the investigation of the global development, spread, and resistance to capitalism and European expansion. I start this work with the material culture – the artifacts and landscapes – produced and consumed by people caught up in these processes. These material traces are then woven with documentary traces to develop holistic understandings of how the world of today came into being. I have found it crucial to read the theoretical and historical perspectives on capitalism and conquest developed by authors positioned variously throughout the globe, bringing perspectives of people who know the various political economies and cultural forms of the peoples of Africa , the Americas , and Europe . This global focus frames my field work on sites in Western Massachusetts in the US , including work in Deerfield Village in Deerfield and at the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Great Barrington. This said, I encourage and sponsor students interested in these local areas as well as those interested in studying capitalism and conquest elsewhere around the globe. Finally, I hold to the idea that historical archaeology is best understood within a broad anthropological perspective, one that compares and contrasts the workings of the modern world with those of archaeologically known ancient and pre-state societies. I find I can best do this work with colleagues in the Anthropology department as well as people interested in Native American Indian studies, Afro American Studies, and Women's Studies. Reflecting my concerns, I teach our introduction to general anthropology for non-majors, Anthro 100 Human Nature, co-teach courses on Native studies, and co-direct our Summer Field School in Archaeology.
Janine Solberg Telephone: (413-545-3560 Janine Solberg is an Assistant Professor of English. She joined the UMass faculty in the Fall of 2007 and teaches in the Department's Professional Writing and Technical Communications Program http://www.umass.edu/pwtc/ . She holds a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in writing studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests span the field of rhetoric and composition, though she is particularly interested in technical communication, digital media, gender, and histories of technology and literate activity. She is currently working on a book-length project that analyzes the intersections of gender, technology, and literacy in early twentieth century American career advice texts for women. At the University of Illinois, she directed the Programs in Professional Writing and helped develop and run communication workshops for the Mid-America Earthquake Center. She has taught courses in business and technical writing, web design, and an advanced composition course called Writing with Video http://writingwithvideo.net/ .
Telephone: (413) 542-5371 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.
Telephone: (413) 545-5519 David Toomey is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Program for Professional Writing and Technical Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He teaches Introduction to Professional Writing, Advanced Software for Professional Writers, and Nonfiction Writing and Commercial Publishing. In Fall 2007 he taught a graduate course entitled "Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Literary Culture," and in Fall 2009 he will teach a graduate course entitled "Cosmology and 17th and 18th Century British Literature." Toomey holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia (1998), where his dissertation was Dreams of Different Things: The Experience of Schizophrenia as Represented in Journals, Clinical Accounts and Fiction of the Modernist Period. His research interests are science writing and mental illness and literature. His most recent book is The New Time Travelers: a Journey to the Frontiers of Physics (W.W. Norton, 2007). Other books include Stormchasers: the Hurricane Hunters and their Flight into Hurricane Janet (W.W. Norton, 2002), and (with Leslie Haynsworth) Amelia Earhart's Daughters: the Wild and Glorious Story of American Women Aviators from World War II to the Dawn of the Space Age (William Morrow, 1998) and (as second author with James Collier) Scientific and Technical Communication in Theory, Practice and Policy (Sage Publications, 1997).
Telephone: (413) 545-5872 Degree: Ph.D., University of California (1983) Professor Young is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988), The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, and At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale University Press, 2000). Professor Young has worked with numerous city agencies on their memorials and museums. He served as Guest Curator of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, entitled "The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History" (1994). He was also appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany's national "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews," and most recently, he was appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition.
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Professor
Associate Professor of Art History
Professor
David Toomey
James E. Young