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Ann Marie Plane has been on the UCSB faculty since fall of 1994. Prior to that time she worked in several museum settings, including an internship at colonial Williamsburg, front-line interpretation at Plimoth Plantation, a curatorial position at the Barre Historical Museum in Barre, Vermont, and a support position in collections management at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. In 1990 she made the difficult decision to leave museum work for a career in academe, but the UCSB public history program has offered the ideal way to blend her two areas of interest.
Plane plays an important role in UCSB’s graduate program in public history, offering courses in historical memory, material culture studies, and museum studies. She has supervised several dissertations in the field, and serves on many dissertation committees, as well as holding a faculty appointment at UCSB’s partner institution, California State University at Sacramento. Under her leadership, the department expanded its view of public history, and graduate students from a variety of fields, not just US history, now pursue field specializations as well as specialized degrees in public history. She has also served as editor, co-editor, and reviews editor for The Public Historian, and remains involved in several local historical institutions, most notably the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. She is a current participant in the summit for History Education in California, sponsored by the California History and Social Science Project. Plane also spearheaded the development of UCSB’s undergraduate curriculum in public history, introducing a core series of three classes: History 192 Introduction to Public History, History 192Q History, Memory and Museums, and History 192P Proseminar in Public History, a capstone professional internship course for juniors and seniors interested in real-world work experience in the several subdisciplines of Public history. She remains excited about the central mission of public history and public historians, and about what they can offer both to the community at large and to historians practicing in the academy: “More than other history practitioners, Public Historians remain deeply committed to the goal of making historical research and historical knowledge pluralistic, accessible, and useable for a broad range of audiences. That is a critical mission, and one that fulfills the promise of community history, oral history, and social history that I love.”
Professor Plane's History department webpage |
