Public History Courses
Mission Statement of the Public History Program at University of Louisiana at Lafayette:
To introduce and train students to work in settings that require shared authority, reflexive educational practices, civic engagement, and political sensitivities in public settings to prepare them for careers in museums, archives, digital humanities, historic preservation, community organizations, governmental and nonprofit policy centers, and education, among others.
To provide and support public history for communities in Louisiana and beyond.
To advance--through hands-on fieldwork and public interaction--community-driven public history practice that is sensitive to stake-holder interests and recognizes the complexities in the production and presentation of historical scholarship.
To instill ethical and inclusive approaches to historical research, interpretation, and administration--rooted in relationships, respect, reciprocity, responsibility, and reverence--and to train students to recognize the cultural, political, intellectual, and historical contexts that shape their work as historians and collaborators.
Collections History in Museums & Archives
This course combines both practical instruction in collections management and academic readings in history and museum studies of collections. We will be partnering with the Hilliard University Art Museum on one project throughout the semester so that you can get some hands-on training with historical artifacts as collection items and learn about possible museum career paths. We will also learn about working with Indigenous archives from the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana.
This course provides an introduction and practical guide to the policies, procedures and current debates in museum and archival collections. We will learn about the history of museum and archival collections and the historiographical approaches to analyzing collections to understand how and why the US and Europe have such extensive collections of material culture. From the practical side, we will learn about mission statements, collection policies, documentation, assessment, preservation, ethical considerations and colonial vs Indigenous approaches to collections and archives. We will alternate between readings on the practical and the historical in order to better assess the limitations of today's standards in collections management.
Course requirements include weekly participation, weekly readings, one in-class presentation, practical assignments, and one group project.
Digital History
In the last two decades, museums, libraries and archives have looked to digital tools to digitize their collections and share their content virtually with potential visitors who cannot travel to the site. In the wake of environmental and public health disasters, such as hurricanes, fires, and the COVID19 pandemic, digitization is now a necessary means of preserving and sharing cultural heritage. Digital tools are increasingly being employed in onsite exhibits as well, to encourage social justice actions among museum visitors, or, more generally, as part of the museum’s interpretive strategy to better achieve education and outreach goals. In addition, museum professionals and academics are experimenting more and more with digital platforms to engage students of history in new ways, to find more successful approaches in training students in difficult histories, such as computer games on the history of enslavement and the history of colonization of Indigenous peoples. In this class we will examine case studies in how digital history has been used to collect, research and educate histories of trauma and protest from the US and Germany. We will learn different how to use different digital technologies for public history projects and for historical research.
Museum Exhibition Design and Development
Museums are some of the world’s most popular sites of education and leisure. This course will train you in how to curate and design an exhibition at a well-established museum, using the museum’s permanent collection. We will meet with registrars, collections managers, curators, interpreters and museum educators to gain a better understanding of the numerous departments involved in curating, designing, and making use of museum exhibitions. As such, the course will provide you with an introduction to numerous possible career paths as a museum-based public historian. Your final assignment for the course will be to work as a group to design an exhibit from the science and technology collection of an AAM accredited museum. Your main directive is to apply the assigned readings on decolonizing public history to design an inclusive exhibit that addresses and redresses the history of white supremacy in the US.
Oral Histories of Folk Medicine: Native American, African American, Creole and Cajun Practices of Healing
This course will provide an overview of the global history of medicine from the early modern to modern period, We will then focus on the rise of modern medicine and its efforts to suppress long standing healing practices of various communities, particularly in the Deep South. Students will also be trained in oral history methods, use the resources of the Guilbeau Center for Public History to collect oral histories from Native American, African American, Creole and Cajun community members. Students will publish podcasts, form an oral history collection for the Guilbeau Center and design a digital website on the histories of healing.
PUBLIC HISTORY OF SLAVERY IN LOUISIANA
GUEST SPEAKERS, VISITS TO KEY HISTORIC SITES, AND WORK WITH LOCAL MUSEUMS WILL HELP STUDENTS UNDERSTAND THE DEEP HISTORY OF ENSLAVEMENT IN LAFAYETTE AND LOUISIANA. STUDENTS WILL PARTICIPATE IN A CONFERENCE ON THE PUBLIC HISTORY OF SLAVERY AND HELP CURATE AN EXHIBIT THAT WILL BE FEATURED AT VERMILIONVILLE.
HERITAGE AND MEMORY IN HISTORY MUSEUMS
This class examines museums and memorials that represent heritage, history and memory. How do some heritages come to be memorialized and institutionalized and others excluded? Case studies from different regions and social contexts will be explored including conflict heritage, minority heritage, indigenous heritage sites of conscience, the relationship between heritage, development and tourism to history museums and memorials. Considering cultural institutions as diverse as Colonial Williamsburg, immigration museums in the US, Slavery museums in Africa, Holocaust museums in Europe, and museums of Native American history and culture, we seek out common themes and problems that provide opportunities for growth in institutional representations of the past. Topics covered include: authenticity, race, cultural property, nationalism, interpretation, multivocality, contact zones, multiculturalism and community outreach. Our objective is to examine the connections and distinctions between the theory and practice of exhibiting history and to understand how material culture, social process and historical events converge in the social production of collections and institutions. Our focus is on museums not merely as containers of history, but as social arenas that influence and determine the politics, value and experience of the past. Students will develop a theoretical toolkit for contextualizing and addressing controversies in the heritage industry of cultural institutions.
History and Theory of Museums
This course considers the history of museums from a transnational perspective in an effort to understand the varying social, political, and cultural roles that museums have played in their long histories. Throughout the semester, we will explore museums as both cultural institutions and as institutional cultures, places in which ideas about art, identity, culture, and history are regularly made and remade. By the end of the course, students will have new insight into the ways in which museums and their exhibitions have shaped the many ways in which we see the world.
Introduction to Public History
This graduate level seminar introduces students to community engagement, shared authority, ethical and inclusive approaches to interpreting history, and communicating history to a broad general audience while remaining sensitive to a wide range of stake-holder interests. Guest Speakers from museums, libraries, archives, digital humanities, and consulting firms will provide students with additional insights into a wide range of career opportunities in community-centered history work. Students will collaborate on a final project building on the skills they have learned and contributing to the latest community engaged research taking place at the university.
Historic Sites and the Politics of Preservation: Native American and African American Public History
Students who complete this course will review 150 years of preservation projects in the U.S., a movement that has not only saved historic houses, but established the national park system and documented the nation's heterogeneous history. Students will encounter powerful, evocative interpretive projects, contemporary battles over preservation, innovative approaches to programming and community formation, as well as failed attempts to preserve public space. Students will discuss the controversies surrounding these spaces, paying particular attention to the social and political context in which both the original use and reuse of historic space took place. With a focus on which histories have been preserved by the government as part of the national narrative and which have been ignored, we will examine strategies for proposing new historical sites. In what contexts have African American and Native American histories succeeded in being preserved? What were the issues debated by community members and government officials around contested sites? The course is organized into three themes: (1) types of historic sites and cultural landscapes, (2) processes of preservation, and (3) activating historic sites. Assignments include proposing new historical sites and creating a walking tour of historic sites in the city.
Desegregation in Higher Education
In this advanced undergraduate/graduate public history course, students will be introduced to archival research, oral history methodology, collaborative research with community members, cultivating university-community partnerships, archive and exhibition development through community - centered history harvest, ethical and inclusive approaches to interpreting history for the general public, and how to negotiate political sensitivities and viewpoints from multiple stake-holders. Students will be introduced to the multiple sites of research and public engagement that make public history projects possible. This course is team-taught by Cheylon Woods, MLIS, MA, Director of the Gaines Center and Dr. Marissa Petrou, Director of the Guilbeau Center for Public History. Significant contributions to the course will also come from Ben Hickey, Director of the Hilliard University Art Museum, and Kiwana McClung, Director of Campus Diversity. This course is additionally supported by the Office the President of the University and the Office of Communications, as part of the university's commemoration of the desegregation of this campus.