Public Humanities Initiative, Through Steven Lubar, Pushes Boundaries of Museum Studies

"My hope is that people who get the new M.A. will not only find work in museums but also in historic preservation or radio and television, and community cultural development," Lubar says.

by Mark Nickel

The Nightingale-Brown House at 357 Benefit St. is massive and old - the nation's largest surviving, fully restored, wood-frame eighteenth-century house. Its 19,000 square feet housed five generations of the Brown family and remain home to much of the family's archives.

But this is more than a building. The Nightingale-Brown House holds much of the Brown family's archives, and is itself a scholarly resource that can be read as a history of upper-class Providence life since 1792. It is also the site of Brown's new initiative in public humanities.

Ask Steven Lubar (left), professor of American civilization and director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization about "public humanities," and he begins with a thoughtful pause.

"The term 'public humanities' has been around for a while, but I don't think the public understands what the word 'humanities' means," says Lubar. "When you ask people if they are interested in history, if they visit museums, if they appreciate historic buildings, if they watch the History Channel or if they like the Discovery Channel, the response is very high. They don't know the term, but there is a very, very strong interest in public humanities. People want to understand more about the past, the arts, communities, change."

Lubar, who arrived at Brown from the Smithsonian Institution, where he chaired the Division of the History of Technology, has begun building Brown's public humanities program in the Department of American Civilization. There is a new public humanities master's degree in the works (a successor to Brown's master's in museum studies), a plan for an "experimental gallery space," and several other projects, many involving new media.

It turns out that the musty term museum studies no longer does justice to a field where practitioners now use radio and television documentaries, CDs, DVDs, cell phones, sphisticated Web pages, iPods and other new media as tools to present the work of scholars to a wider public. "Brown set up its museum studies program about thirty years ago," Lubar explains. "There are so many more ways to get the word out now, and we want to use them all."

The master's degree program will expand from three semesters to two full years, but not just because there are so many new information technologies to master. "We hope what will set our program apart is that it will have a larger academic component - making better historians, better academic training," Lubar says. "It will include many of the elements of museum studies and public history, but my hope is that people who get the new M.A. will not only find work in museums but also in historic preservation or radio and television, and community cultural development."

Before coming to Brown, Lubar directed the Smithsonian's $30-million "America on the Move" exhibit, the National Museum of American History's largest and most expensive exhibit to date. He also helped curate shows on the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age.

The trick in presenting complex, challenging scientific material to general audiences is to balance the needs of the expert and the viewer. "Certainly, making complex ideas accessible is important, but there are ways of presenting sophisticated knowledge from years of study without dumbing it down - and without saying that everybody is equally good at this," Lubar adds. "The key is to give both professor and public credit for what they know and are interested in. The phrase I like to use is 'shared authority.' It's not that 'I'm an expert and I'll tell you what you should know,' but rather 'Here's what I know and how I look at this topic, and I'm interested in what you know and how you look at it.' The public has its own history, perspectives, and understandings that may be an important part of what the expert is studying. Balancing many kinds of expertise and understandings is the biggest challenge in the field."

Developing that ability to connect larger audiences with the work of scholars and scientists is what the initiative in public humanities is all about, and where better to undertake that work than at Brown. From the Nightingale-Brown House, with its archives and collections, to the new laboratories and academic programs of the Plan for Academic Enrichment, Lubar's students have an almost limitless array of subject matter.

"It's a rare program that has all those resources for students to actually use," Lubar concludes. "One of the things I'll be pushing for in the next few years is a better exhibition space so that we'll be able to exhibit work not just by our students in American Civilization but by students throughout the University. I hope we can open that up a bit further. How soon that happens will depend on who else in the Brown community gets excited about it. There are all sorts of amazing projects going on around Brown."