Moving out

I now have a grownup professional website. Please redirect your feed readers over there!

 

Synthetic Thinking Can Be Learned

Or so I attempt to demonstrate in a post up now at History@Work.

 

New article

Here I am complicating the PPIE centennial story in Boom.

 

Four things

that I’ve written recently:

an op-ed about World’s Fairs

a Kern Your Enthusiasm piece about braille fonts

a blog post about an exhibit project

and a co-authored book chapter about collecting contemporary technology.

 

 

Happy new year and elections

I hope your 2014  is full of museumgoing and critical reflection on history!

In the new year, may I suggest that the NCPH members among my readers vote in the NCPH board elections?  You should have received an email in December with voting information.  The election closes on Jan 5 and I am running for nominating committee.   I’d appreciate your support.

 

That weekend

The  third weekend in April continues to be excessively popular for conferences in our (dear museum/history-inclined reader!) fields, which this year includes Museums and the Web and NCPH (which looks like a terrific meeting in Ottawa this year.)

I will be attending neither of these, but will instead be attending this conference in Minneapolis, “Practicing Science, Engaging Publics,” in honor of my graduate advisor, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt.  It’s a one-day event on April 20th, free and open to the public, and if you’re in the area I highly suggest you stop by!

I will be talking about my research on this guy, and my academic siblings will be talking about other interesting topics around the history of biology, history of anthropology and field work, popularization, and professionalization, all in Sally-inflected ways.  Hope to see you there.

 

The move

Friends, since last we spoke I packed everything I owned, drove across most of the country with a yowling cat companion, and arrived safely in the Bay Area, where I am now a curator at the Oakland Museum of California.  My remit is “contemporary history,” and I am excited to think through what it means for museums to be places that collect, exhibit and facilitate the contemporary.  I’m also delighted to be at a multidisciplinary museum and one with an exemplary commitment to visitor voices and new ways of doing museum work.  New horizons, indeed–I may even start blogging regularly again.

 

Belated Conference Report

It is a testament to the quality and high level of engagement of this year’s NCPH conference that the web is already full of conference reports; here’s mine. The NCPH/OAH meeting in Milwaukee was full of interesting sessions on vital work in the field, passionate people doing good history, free wifi, and excellent beer. I’m clearly biased as a native rustbelter, but Milwaukee was a fine place for 2000+ historians to gather—friendly, compact, and with its own history to explore.

The conference began with a THATCamp with the usual quotient of inquiry and energy. After the conference had officially opened, our session on contemporary DIY movements and public history institutions (which, thanks to Kate Freedman’s presentation, became known as “the steampunk panel”) was on Thursday morning. The presentations were followed by a challenging discussion, and we’ll be putting some version of the panel online.

I also heard a great panel about interpreting women’s history at unlikely places. “Assume women were there,” said Heather Huyck of the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites, capping off the session after a surprising presentation about interpreting Julia Dent Grant and enslaved women at the US Grant Historic Site in St Louis. Many posts on other sessions can be found at History @Work, as well as discussions of some of the organizational issues at stake, in particular the still-up-in-the-air fate of The Public Historian journal.

Milwaukee’s museums were another highlight of the trip for me. I was lucky enough to get a tour of the Milwaukee Public Museum, one of America’s great encyclopedia museums. The typewriter was invented by Milwaukee resident Christopher Sholes and the MPM has one of the world’s best typewriter collections, which the curator graciously took me into storage to see.  The exhibitry there is also fascinating; they have an enormous amount of natural history and anthropology content, told through dioramas, including early work by Carl Akeley.  I also visited the art-of-engineering museum and the lovely mid-century conservatory, The Domes.

See you next year in Ottawa!

 

Elsewhere

As perhaps you’ve noticed, I am now a contributor to The Atlantic Technology channel.  I’ve recently written about typewriter nostalgia, shorthand, and Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality.  Do subscribe to the channel; there’s a continuous stream of historically inflected work there, as well as historiography of technology disguised as current tech news analysis.

 

Housekeeping

A few blog- and Suzanne-related notes:

• This spring you’ll see me in Milwaukee at the NCPH/OAH conference (for which a hashtag has not yet been determined).  Our panel “Museums and Makers:  Intersections of Public History from Steam Trains to Steampunk” will be Thursday, April 19 at 10:30. Be there.  The conference program is online now.

• I will also be attending THATCamp CHNM in June.

• Prompted by Mark Tebeau‘s discussion of museum blogs the other day on twitter, I have revised my blogroll for the first time in years: an updated mix of museum, public history, and history of science/technology/medicine blogs.  Though I personally blog only sporadically these days, my colleagues are doing some excellent thinking and writing.

• (The title of this post is an excellent opportunity to direct you to this excellent piece by Cat Valente about gendered futures and domestic work in science fiction, and, even further parenthetically, a wee post I wrote about laundry as a “B-List Holy Grail” a few years back–a testimony to the continued importance of scholarship like More Work for Mother.)