Faculty Supervisor
Kathleen Franz is Associate Professor and Director of Public History in the History Department at American University, Washington, D.C. She holds a PhD in American Civilization from Brown University where she trained in American cultural history, the history of technology, and museum studies. Her publications include Tinkering: Americans Reinvent the Early Automobile (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and the forthcoming Major Problems in American Popular Culture, co-edited with Susan Smulyan (Wadsworth Cengage, 2010). Her awards and prizes include several national fellowships and the Hindle Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. An active public historian, she has acted as curator on several exhibitions, including most recently David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture (National Building Museum, June 2007-May 2008) and On Track: Transit and the American City (National Building Museum, 2001-2002). At American University she runs the public history program, oversees numerous student projects in and around D.C., and teaches courses on public history, American popular culture, and visual and material culture.
Faculty Supervisor
Steven Lubar, a professor in the departments of history and American civilization at Brown University, runs Brown’s public humanities program and is director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. He came to Brown after twenty years at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he was chair of the division of the history of technology, and where he worked on many exhibitions and collection projects, including Engines of Change, and America on the Move, and a museum history project that resulted in co-authoring Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian: At Brown, he’s expanded his interests to include community cultural development, public art and cultural heritage, and most recently, learning how to be director of an anthropology museum.
Faculty Supervisor
Daniel Kerr is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA. He directs the department’s Shenandoah Valley Oral History Project and helps coordinate its public history program. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in History from Case Western Reserve University and his B.A. in History from Carleton College. His book, Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio, is scheduled for publication in February 2011. Kerr specializes in the fields of environmental history, urban social history, and oral history. Since arriving in Harrisonburg, he has designed a fieldwork-based course that examines the history of the local poultry industry. He supervises interns and serves as a consultant for the American Enterprise team.
Faculty Supervisor
Rosetta Marantz Cohen is Sylvia Dluglasch Bauman Professor of American Studies and Education at Smith College, and is the Director of the Smith College Internship Program at the Smithsonian Museum and co-founder of the Museums Concentration at Smith. She received her BA from Yale University, her MFA from Columbia University and her EdD from Teachers College, Columbia. She teaches courses on the history and philosophy of education, and is the author of four books on American school reform and the history of the teaching profession, including The Work of Teachers in America: A Social History Through Stories (Erlbaum, 1997), and The Teacher-Centered School (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Her current work is in the area of international education and women’s access to literacy education.
Faculty Supervisor
Allison Marsh is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina where she directs the museum studies track of the public history program. At USC, she is actively involved with exhibition development at the McKissick Museum and currently curates two major shows: Imaging the Invisible, an investigation of how we come to trust images that picture things invisible to the naked eye, and The Ultimate Vacation, a history of factory tours in America. Public history courses taught by her at USC include Museums and Monuments and Material Culture Studies. She holds a PhD in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Johns Hopkins University.