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Harold Marcuse didn't take a single history course in college, until he went to study abroad during his senior year. Inspired by several fascinating teachers, he became interested in art history, worked as a tour guide, and ultimately wrote a Master's thesis (contents and 100-page pdf) about German monuments and memorials commemorating events during the Nazi period. He also co-produced a traveling photographic exhibition about those memorials (32 page catalog), which was shown in more than two dozen German cities in the 1980s . Marcuse then returned to the US to write a Ph.D. thesis on the post-war history of the Dachau concentration camp, after it was no longer a camp, retracing the steps until it was turned into a memorial site in 1965, and then its evolution as a museum (Legacies of Dachau book page).
After completing his dissertation at the University of Michigan in 1992, Marcuse came to UCSB to teach German and Public history. He has offered several praxis-oriented undergraduate courses on oral history, especially on interviewing Holocaust survivors (Holocaust Oral History project website), a graduate reading seminar on what many people call Collective Memory (History in the Public Sphere course website), and a research seminar in Public History (fragmentary 2007 website). Marcuse calls his approach to history "reception history"; his Reception History webpage offers a definition and examples.
As an undergraduate physics/computer science major, Marcuse is fairly tech savvy, and uses the internet in much of his teaching. Most of his upper division courses have websites that publish student work (see, for example, his Featured Student Research page). He has also presented about the use of the Internet in history teaching, and about bibliographic and note-taking software for historians ("The Internet as a Venue for Scholarly Interaction with the Public" thesis paper; Zotero & Endnote comparison). Finally, he has held workshops on teaching the Holocaust for K-12 teachers in a "Personal Remembrance and History" summer course (3 workshops), and on "Technology in the History-Social Science Classroom" (2002 hyperlinked outline).
Students interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Public History with Prof. Marcuse should see his Graduate Study page. Some of the topics his doctoral students are working on include: reception histories of the Nazi general Rommel and the 1945 Dresden bombing, a history of a Holocaust refugee who escaped to Manila, and about the changing identities of ethnic German Polish migrants to West Germany in the 1980s.
Professor Marcuse's departmental webpage |
