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About the Field
About the Field
UC Santa Barbara defined Public History as a profession in 1976, with a Rockefeller Foundation grant to train historians for public and private sector careers beyond conventional academic employment. Since then, we have produced more than 100 students who apply their historical skills, knowledge, and insights in public settings – in museums and heritage sites, businesses, government agencies, nonprofit groups, and private foundations. To meet the wide range of opportunities presented by the many publics we serve, the UCSB program prepares students first as historians – broadly trained scholar-professionals fully versed in the literature, methods, and interpretive debates of the venerable discipline – but also especially conscious of the special challenges and resources distinctive to the public practice of history. Public history students regularly take advantage of the History Department’s large and diverse faculty to integrate their particular research and reading interests into their program. Students have the opportunity to intern locally with the Santa Barbara Mission Archives Library, which houses the Franciscan Archives of the West, and hone their interpretive skills with Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, which engages with the public at the historic Presidio and the Casa de la Guerra in downtown Santa Barbara, as well as the Santa Ynez Mills.
The formal course of study for the Ph.D. degree is further enhanced by opportunities to:
- participate in the editing and production of The Public Historian, the quarterly history journal jointly published by our program and the National Council for Public History
- spend research or internship quarters in residence at the UCSB Washington D.C. Center, with research grant and teaching assistantship support available
- meet and discuss the field with prominent visiting public historians in the program’s speaker series; and
- undertake coursework, research, and internships in the state capital, Sacramento, with the Public History Program’s joint doctoral program at California State University, Sacramento.
Students will work with an unusually broad and dynamic faculty:
- Randy Bergstrom, History of Public Policy
- Sarah Case, Editor, The Public Historian
- Juan Cobo Betancourt, Digital History
- Lisa Jacobson, Oral History
- Harold Marcuse, Digital History, Commemoration
- Stephan Meischer, Oral History, Africa