For the past 21 years, I have taught in the History Department at Carleton College, where I specialize in early modern European history, with a research specialty in the history of old age and social welfare in the eighteenth century. These research interests grew directly out of my participation in an undergraduate “Adopt a Grandparent” volunteer program, and a few years of work with individuals who had intellectual disabilities and autism, in the early and mid-1990s. The connection between civic engagement and my academic work has continued in my classroom teaching, where I have offered community engagement opportunities in many of my courses.
My connection to public history deepened tremendously from 2011-14, when I served as the Director of Carleton’s Humanities Center and collaborated extensively with the Minnesota Humanities Center. I was honored to be appointed to the Board of Directors of the MHC in 2015, and that experience cemented my commitment to the practice and promotion of the public humanities. I now co-direct Carleton’s Mellon-funded initiative “Public Works: Carleton Arts and Humanities Connecting Communities,” and I regularly teach Carleton’s public history practicum course “Historians for Hire.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has me thinking in new ways about the importance of the practice of public history. As a social historian, I practice “history from below,” always digging in archives for information on the people whose voices are hardest to hear in the remote past. I have been wondering, how can I help to make sure that social historians of the future can find the voices of *all* peoples affected by this crisis? How can my students practice their public history skills (including preserving and presenting historical sources) in ways that will ensure that broader publics see the value of history at this crucial moment? These questions helped motivate me to structure Carleton’s spring term “Historians for Hire” course around the collection of materials for A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19, and our local digital repository.
Through our participation in these archival initiatives, I hope that my students and I both create something of real use to future historians, and have the opportunity to reflect together on the role of public historians in times of crisis. I will bring a personal commitment to collecting the experiences of communities with whom my classes have worked closely in the past, and to ensuring that our archive is inclusive and welcoming to older people who have been particularly hard hit by the novel coronavirus.
