Seminar in Public History

This course examines the role that history and historical narratives perform in the public sphere. We explore the ways in which audiences remember, imagine and in other ways engage with the past, whether it be as tourists at a theme park, visitors to a museum or war memorial, or as media consumers, broadly defined. The course will appeal to students working, or seeking to work, in areas such as documentary making, museum curatorship, oral history, or heritage management as well as to those interested in the burgeoning scholarly debates about how history is practised outside the academic sphere. The course involves analysis of films, exhibitions, broadcasts, re-enactments, and community-based history telling, while engaging with a range of critical and theoretical readings. The course involves site visits to major cultural institutions where we meet curators and other historical practitioners. The assessment requirements for the course provide students with the opportunity to develop and demonstrate practical skills in interviewing and other forms of non-written historical communication and inquiry.