World expert in digital public history, Mark Tebeau directs the ASU’s public history program where he teaches courses on history research methods, public history, historical memory & monuments, urban & environmental history, and oral history. Funded in 2022 by the Public History and Outreach department of the C²DH, this three-month fellowship works as a project incubator that will benefit both the fellow and the Centre.
The public historian in residence fellowship serves as an incubator for developing synergies and dialogues that enrich the theoretical conversations that C²DH scholars are fostering locally and internationally; it also serves to bring the practice-based insights from C²DH to broader intellectual communities. As the first public historian in residence, Tebeau collaborates with Professor Thomas Cauvin and the PHACS (Public History as the New Citizen Science) team to explore a variety of theoretical and practice-based issues in public history related to student training, the boundaries of crowdsourcing and citizenship, theories and practices of curation, as well as how we interpret monuments and historical memory for public audiences.
The insights from these conversations will generate transformative conversations for both C²DH and partner scholars and their institutions. For example, the first public historian in residence at C²DH brings questions about his ongoing exploration of the pandemic – A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19, a crowdsourced digital archive of the pandemic curated by an international consortium of history students and professionals. This will relate and enrich the C²DH’s own Covid-19 Memory project. The fellowship allows Tebeau (and colleagues) to explore more deeply questions related to the design, process of public engagement and discovery, and sustainability of crowdsourced digital archives.
Bringing the fellow to Luxembourg will enrich the training programs at C²DH related to aspects of the public history course and programming for the future Master in Digital and Public History at the University of Luxembourg. It also introduces possibilities for international student exchange and collaboration on ongoing C²DH projects and international public history projects. This collaboration ranges widely; including the 2022 conference of the International Federation for Public History (whose headquarters is now at the University of Luxembourg) and building connections to other Covid-19 archives such as the CoronArchiv and ISCHE Education & Pandemics Archive. Also, Tebeau’s work in digital curation (including developing Curatescape) will support the PHACS team as it develops the next, digital phases of representing the HistorEsch project’s oral histories, and it will create possible student-based collaborations around the documentation and interpretation of World War II Monuments across the globe. These bridges are expected to support student professional development and to internationalize public history in ways that enhance dialogues on the American side of the Atlantic. For more information about the Public Historian in Residence fellowship, contact Thomas Cauvin at thomas.cauvin@uni.lu.