The Public Humanities Tomorrow: Working with School Communities
The Public Humanities Tomorrow: The Public Humanities Tomorrow: Working with School Communities
Date: Thursday, December 10, 2020
Video coming soon!
Panelists:
Jason Cohen, Berea College
Patrick Oray, Bard Early College High School
Mary Rizzo, Rutgers University - Newark
Khadijah Costley White, Rutgers University - New Brunswick
Chair:
Denise Meringolo, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Public humanities’ emphasis on collaboration, storytelling, and community encourages students to recognize their own knowledge and experiences as valuable in a collective process of inquiry. This challenges traditionally hierarchical power structures in the classroom and empowers students to become more active leaders and learners. The members of this panel have all worked with K-12 students and teachers in projects designed to expand public engagement with the humanities. These collaborative partnerships between post-secondary institutions and public schools enrich K-12 education by making available unique archival and primary materials, highlighting the importance of regional histories to student learning, and emphasizing the role that students’ own experiences can play in making education meaningful.
About the Public Humanities Tomorrow Series
The Public Humanities Network of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), in partnership with the Whiting Foundation, is organizing a series of of virtual gatherings called 'The Humanities Tomorrow’.
These gatherings are designed to share experiences of contemporary humanities projects by scholars who are visionaries and change-makers, with a focus on practical lessons we might share as a community in committing to this work.
Each gathering will last no longer than 90 minutes, will be open to everyone who registers in advance, and will be recorded for sharing through the CHCI afterwards.
About the Speakers
Jason Cohen
Jason Cohen is an associate professor of English at Berea College (KY), where he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Duke University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, Jesse Ball duPont foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, International Journal of Humanities and Computing, Upstart Crow, Shakespeare Bulletin, and elsewhere. His scholarship in early modern comparative literature considers the intersection of literary methods with natural and political systems of thought, including historical cartography, book history, and the application of digital and computational methods to historical questions. Lead co-editor of a volume forthcoming from SUNY Press titled Teaching Race in Perilous Times, he is also currently completing a book on Francis Bacon’s natural and political philosophy titled Political by Nature: Forms of the Subject in Francis Bacon’s Thought, 1597-1625. A third project, a cultural history of the 2×4, is in development. His digital projects include founding the longest-running intercollegiate undergraduate research eJournal in the United States, Apollon (2008-2018, now under new leadership) as well as a peer-reviewed and nationally recognized critical mapping project for early modern European colonial cartography, www.Wavesofempire.org. He is the Director of an NEH “Humanities Connections” grant (2017-2021) that is developing a curriculum in digital and computational methods for critical archival studies through an institutional partnership with the historic Appalachian heritage site, the Pine Mountain Settlement School.
Patrick Oray
Dr. Patrick Brenus Oray, Jr., received his B.A. in English from the University of Illinois (1995) and his PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa (2013). As Faculty in Literature at BHSEC–Baltimore, Dr. Oray teaches Literature of the Americas (9th Grade), First Year Seminar (Year 1) and an elective course on Theories of Social Justice and Civic Engagement. In past years he has also taught electives in play writing and historical fiction.
Mary Rizzo
Mary Rizzo specializes in modern U.S. cultural history, urban studies, public humanities, and digital humanities. She is particularly interested in food studies, representations of cities, and inclusive public history. After earning her PhD in American Studies from the University Minnesota, she built a successful career in public history. From leading tours of an 18th century historic house museum to being the Associate Director of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the state’s premier provider of public humanities funding and programming, she gained practical experience in how to successfully engage the public with history. She created the public humanities MA track in the Graduate Program in American Studies to prepare students to be leaders in public history and humanities organizations. An active scholar, writer and researcher, Rizzo is currently working on Come and Be Shocked: Representing Baltimore from John Waters to The Wire. She has also served as a board member for the National Council on Public History and is on the editorial board of New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She has worked as a consultant with several organizations, including Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, New Jersey State Museum, Gallery Aferro, and the Tuckerton Seaport. She tweets as rizzo_pubhist.
Khadijah Costley White
Khadijah Costley White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Previously she worked as a journalist on an Emmy-nominated team at NOW on PBS (formerly NOW with Bill Moyers) and a New York City Teaching Fellow. White researches race and gender in media and politics. Her book, Raising the Volume: How the News Media Created the Tea Party (Oxford, 2018) examines the rise of the Tea Party in online, print, broadcast, and cable news. In addition to her scholarly work, she consults on documentary films and has served the MacArthur Foundation as an external advisor in journalism and media. In 2007 the National Association of Black Journalists and United Nations awarded her a reporting fellowship to Senegal. She has also received the University of Pennsylvania Women of Color at Penn Award, an Emerging Diversity Scholar citation from the University of Michigan, and was a White House intern on the Obama administration’s Broadcast Media team.
Denise Meringolo
Denise Meringolo is a scholar-practitioner in the field of public history. She teaches courses in community-based public history practice, museums and material culture, and digital public history.She and her students partner with Baltimore Heritage, a local preservation advocacy organization, to develop content for the app Explore Baltimore Heritage, which allows users to take self-guided walking tours of Baltimore neighborhoods. Her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (University of Massachusetts, 2012) won the 2013 National Council on Public History prize for the best book in the field. She is a member of the Long Range Planning Committee of the National Council on Public History.