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Public History and Theory

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Public History, Theory, and Methodology

About the Cluster

About the Cluster

This cluster brings together faculty members and graduate students who collaborate with diverse publics to expand knowledge about the past and highlight its relevance to our current historical moment. Members have created documentary films, podcasts, and environmental tour guides that combine scholarship and advocacy work. Others have co-created museum exhibitions, oral histories, and historical markers in collaboration with community groups, nonprofits, and local businesses. We also investigate the politics of memorialization and commemoration, bringing to light visions of the past that have been silenced and marginalized while exposing social injustices that conventional historical narratives have long ignored or omitted. Members have used crowd-sourcing and other collaborative tools to create Digital Historical Archives and Digital Exhibitions. Our focus is both local and global. We privilege local knowledge and local spaces, but use public history methods to illuminate how diverse publics have memorialized and mobilized the past in different times and places around the world.

This research cluster hosts a Public History Colloquium that convenes three or four times each quarter. We invite nationally prominent public historians to discuss their public history practices, methodologies, and projects. We periodically hold workshops to learn from our own faculty and graduate students who have developed expertise in museum pedagogy, podcasting, policy and environmental consulting work, and public-facing writing. We draw upon UC Santa Barbara’s close partnerships with the Channel Coast District of California State Parks, the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Santa Barbara Mission Archives Library to create graduate student internships and provide hands-on training. In recent years, many of our graduate students have created tour guides and more inclusive educational programming for the Relevancy and History Program, part of the California State Parks’ Re-examining our Past initiative.

Graduate students in this cluster also have the opportunity to help edit and produce The Public Historian, the flagship journal of the field, jointly published by UC Santa Barbara and the National Council on Public History.

Cluster Members

Current and Recent Projects

Public History Colloquium

What Our Alumni Are Up To