Discussion
The Future of the Public History Program at UChicago
Event Summary
Mona Hatoum, Current Disturbance, Galleri 3,14 (Bergen), March 2012. Installation photo by Svenn Sivertssen via Flickr.
The University of Chicago’s Department of History has sustained a formal Public History program for the last eight years. We have robust course offerings, including a two-quarter practicum for graduate and undergraduate students, a capstone track in the major, a wealth of faculty expertise in the field, and a substantial number of students at the graduate and undergraduate levels eager for public historical training. We also have many open questions about how the program might best move forward in an environment of scarce resources and uncertainty about how public historical training fits into the intellectual project of academic historical research as it is practiced in our department and across the institution. We invite a conversation about how we can sustain and build this work in coordination with other initiatives on public history across and beyond the university.
This event was organized by the Histories of Culture in Disastrous Times research project at the Neubauer Collegium.
About the History in Public Conversation Series
Fields such as public humanities, public history, and public scholarship have often drawn on a distinction between universities and a “public” that exists outside of them. This distinction can, however, appear arbitrary, especially in times of crisis that compel questions about the insulation of academic knowledge production from the challenges facing society at large. We take our current moment of deep uncertainty about the future of the academy as an opportunity to convene a series of conversations about what it means to practice history in public today. What intellectual and practical commitments define a history that is engaged with the world? Who are its practitioners and whom does it serve? What is its place within the university? What forms of learning are required to sustain it? What do these practices mean at the University of Chicago in particular? We invited participants at all career stages and from all fields or institutions, who were interested in thinking about the public dimensions of their work and making connections to the wider community of public historical practice at the University and in Chicago.
Other events in the series
APRIL 23: What Is Public History?
Research Project
