Four Candidates for the IFPH Steering Committee 2016 Elections
The IFPH received four applications to fill the opening positions in its steering committee (See call for application).
You can read the candidates’ profile and statement of interest for the IFPH and international public history below.
Registered members of the IFPH will receive an email Thursday November 3 asking for their vote and will be able to vote until Thursday November 10, 2016.
Each member need to vote for 2 candidates to the 2 At-Large Delegate positions. The IFPH did not receive a candidature for the post of Treasurer.
Thomas Cauvin (IFPH Delegate) for the IFPH Nominating Committee
Catalina Munoz, Assistant Professor at the History Department of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia
Short academic biography
I am Assistant Professor at the History Department of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. I have a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania (2009) and have carried out public history projects parallel to my academic work as a historian. Initially I did this through translating my research into museum exhibits. In 2010, in the context of the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the independence of Colombia from Spain, I co-curated the exhibition “Huellas del Rosario en la independencia: Una multitud de voces debatiendo un nuevo orden”. In 2013, I co-curated the travelling exhibit “Los arhuacos frente a la misión capuchina” which presented to an indigenous audience—the Arhuaco of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta—the results of a collaborative research project on the history of missionary presence in their territory throughout most of the twentieth century. This project allowed me to explore oral history as a way of producing historical knowledge collaboratively and also of engaging with a history project that was of interest to a community in the present. At present, I am working in an oral history project that explores the memories of the inhabitants of a traditional working-class neighborhood of Bogotá that is currently facing a large-scale urban development project. I am interested in recovering the memories of a traditional neighborhood that will soon be dramatically transformed into a modern conglomerate of high-rise buildings, but also in exploring the ways in which people use the past in their present day struggles of resistance and integration to rapid urban change.
Some of my publications include “Indigenous State-Making in the Frontier: Arhuaco Politics in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, 1900-1920” published in Ethnohistory (2016), “‘A Mission of Enormous Transcendence’: The Cultural Politics of Music during Colombia’s Liberal Republic, 1930-1946” published in the Hispanic American Historical Review (2014), and “Redefiniendo la memoria nacional: Debates en torno a la conservación arquitectónica en Bogotá, 1930-1946” published in Historia Crítica (2010).
Short statement of interest in international public history
I included some of my background in public history in my academic biography above because in my experience research and public history have been intertwined. During my training as a historian I was troubled by the question of who was I researching history for. It was a desire to integrate scholarly rigor and public engagement that drew me to something I was not taught about in my academic training: public history. I was initially attracted by museums as a way to communicate research results early in my career, and volunteered at a local museum and pursued a brief training in museum studies before going to graduate school. However, in time I discovered that public history was not only about disseminating knowledge but also about producing knowledge in a more collaborative and less vertical way and I began using oral history as the articulating component of my research. Oral history has allowed me to work through the tension between the requirements of scholarly knowledge and sharing authority with individuals and communities that bring their own agendas to the conversation about the past. But perhaps most importantly it has allowed me to integrate my scholarly work to present-day issues, fostering a much-needed public debate about the past.
Recently, my participation in international networks of public historians (especially through the organization of the 3rd International Public History Conference in Bogotá) allowed me to sense the potential of applying an international perspective to the local questions I have been working on. While the community I am engaging with is in Bogotá, many of the questions I am asking, the methodological challenges, and the analytical tensions that feed my work are not locally bound. Of course, the ways in which the community I work with approaches the past is tied to local historical, economic and political conditions, but it is also tied to transnational ones in a world where goods, information, people and their practices are moving ever more freely. Furthermore, the challenges we face as public historians are tied to the kind of work we are doing: to the ways in which we approach our work as historians. And there is a lot to be learned from sharing our experiences in this respect and thinking of them with an international perspective. Thinking of public history beyond our local and national boundaries, enlivens our practice by recognizing its diversity. It invites us to consider to what extent our perspectives and practices as public historians are shaped by local social structures and worldviews, but also to share common questions, problems and ways of addressing them. It also provides a much needed forum to strengthen a field that remains marginal within the historical discipline in many parts of the world. As a Colombian public historian, participating in an international network is important not only in terms of enriching my own work, but in terms of strengthening and legitimizing public history locally. I believe this is the case for public historians in many other places who are trying to carve out a space for a practice of history that is in closer contact with the public than the national historical traditions have allowed. The IFPH can become an ally in this process.
David Dean, Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
David Dean is hoping to join The Steering Committee as a Member at Large. A Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. David is co-founder and co-director of the Carleton Centre for Public History and co-founder of Carleton’s MA in Public History. He took his BA and MA at Auckland, New Zealand, his PhD at Cambridge, and taught at the University of London, England before moving to Canada. David works with national and local museums, community groups, and performance practitioners.
He was Company Historian to Canada’s National Art Centre’s English Theatre Company between 2008 and 2012. David has published articles on conflicts in museums and on theatre and film as sites of history in journals such as The Public Historian and Museum & Society.
He co-edited History, Memory, Performance (2015) a ground-breaking collection of essays bringing public historians into conversation with theatre and performance studies scholars and artists, and edited Museums as Sites for Historical Understanding, Peace, and Social Justice: Views from Canada, a special issue of Peace and Conflict. Journal of Peace Psychology (2013).
He has just submitted the manuscript of The Companion to Public History to Wiley-Blackwell (forthcoming, 2017). Its 35 chapters were written by public historians from 18 different countries and from all continents.
He is a regular attendee at the annual meetings of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) and presented at IFPH’s conferences in Jinan, China and Bogata, Colombia.
Having supervised over 35 graduate students in the field of public history, he is keen to support IFPH’s Student and New Professional Committee. If elected, David would like to build on the hugely successful conference in Bogota by deepening links between IFPH and public historians in South America as well as seeking new members from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific region.
A keen user of social media, particularly twitter, David has begun blogging on his website performingthepast.com and has been actively supporting moves to create an international journal of public history. He is a member of many organizations including NCPH, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), Performance Studies International, the Canadian Historical Association…. and, of course, IFPH!
Tammy S. Gordon, Associate Professor North Carolina State University
IFPH Steering Committee Application
Tammy S. Gordon Associate Professor North Carolina State University tammy_gordon@ncsu.edu
Position At–‐large Delegate, Steering Committee
Biographical Statement
Tammy S. Gordon is an associate professor in the History Department at North Carolina State University, where she teaches the graduate classes “Introduction to Public History” and “Public History in International Context.” Her research focuses on historical memory and the leisure economy in recent history, and she is the author of two books: Private History in Public: Exhibition and the Settings of Everyday Life (Alta Mira Press, 2010) and The Spirit of 1976: Commerce, Community, and the Politics of Commemoration (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Her current work seeks the relationship between mass photography and the growth of international and domestic heritage tourism from 1888 to 1932. She is the author of articles on public history, historical memory, and the leisure economy and is the creator of the online, community curated site NC HB2: A Citizens’ History. Her blog, Tammy’s Museum Walkabout, explores issues of curation, visitation, and museological thought.
Statement of Interest for the IFPH Steering Committee
My interest in serving on the Steering Committee focuses on three areas of initiative:
1) facilitating a fuller transnational exchange on both graduate and undergraduate education in public history;
2) broadening the IFPH movement by addressing the financial inequities that prevent scholars and practitioners from participating in the annual conference;
3) using strategic social media planning to expand dialogue on international and transnational issues in public history. Statement of Institutional Support David Zonderman, Ph.D. Professor and Chair, History Department North Carolina State University As Chair of the History Department at North Carolina State University, I attest that the department will make a good faith effort in support of international travel for Tammy S. Gordon in fulfilling her duties should she be elected as an At–‐large Delegate to the Steering Committee of the International Federation for Public History.
Tanya Evans, Senior Lecturer, Department of Modern History Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Biographical Statement
I teach Australian history and public history in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia where I convene undergraduate and Masters units in Public History. My students undertake internships with historical and community organizations across NSW and I am in the process of establishing partnerships with a range of international partners including the Centre for Public History at the University of Hamburg. I am in the process of establishing a Faculty Research Centre for Public History.
I specialize in the history of the family, poverty and sexuality. I am passionate about researching ordinary people and places in the past and incorporating ordinary people and places in the process of my research and the construction of historical knowledge. My first three books were about the history of ‘illegitimacy’, poverty and philanthropy. My last book Fractured Families: Life on the Margins in Colonial New South Wales (New South, 2015) was a history of Australia’s oldest surviving charity, The Benevolent Society, which was written in collaboration with family historians and while I worked as a consultant for the charity. This won the NSW Premier’s History Award for Community and Regional History in 2016: $15,000.
Judges’ report: ‘As well as being a history of the marginalized and impoverished in colonial NSW, it examines the methodologies and motivations of public history and family history. These are weighty and, at times, conflicting aims. Tanya Evans weaves the two together effortlessly, allowing the reader to consider the process and motivations of historical research.’
I pitch my work at a variety of audiences because my research is targeted at disrupting people’s assumptions about the history of the family. My next book Swimming with the Spit 100 Years of the Spit Amateur Swimming Club is a community history of my local swimming club published by a University Press. I am currently writing a history of motherhood in Australia commissioned by the National Library of Australia Bringing up Baby: Australian Motherhood from the Dreamtime to the Present while continuing to research the different ways in which family history is practiced in Australia, England and Canada. My publications on family history and public history include:
- ‘Who do you think you are?’ Historical Television Consultancy’, Australian Historical Studies, Autumn 2015.
- ‘Family History, Public History and Identity: Writing a History of The Benevolent Society in its 200th year’, Special Issue of Journal of Australian Studies, June 2013.
- ‘The Use of Memory and Material Culture in the History of the Family in Colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, June 2012.
- ‘Secrets and Lies’: The Radical Potential of Family History’, History Workshop Journal, 2011.
- ‘Family History’, David Dean (ed.), Companion to Public History (Wiley Blackwell Companion, 2017) (accepted April 2016)
- with Anna Clark, ‘Family history and transnational historical consciousness’, in Anna Clark, Sophie Loy-Wilson and Alecia Simmonds (ads), Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2017) (accepted August 2016)
- ‘Local and Community History’, Paul Ashton (ed.), What is Public History Now? (Bloomsbury, 2018)
I also work as a consultant for television productions companies including Artemis and Warner Brothers who produce the Australian series of Who do you think you are? and I curate exhibitions based on my research. I am also passionate about community engagement and I am President of the History Council of NSW – the peak body for historical organizations and people interested in history across the state.
Other Professional Activities
Member of the Advisory Council for the Centre for Public History, UTS, Sydney, Australia.
Editorial and Management Committee Member of the Australian Policy and History Website.
Committee Member of the Sydney branch of the Australian Women’s Archive Project.
Institutional Support
I am in the process of establishing a Faculty Research Centre for Public History – I will aim to expand this into a University Centre over the next few years. This will provide me with some funds to support international collaboration within the IFPH. I also have Faculty Research Funds I can request to support annual international travel.
Statement of Interest in the Position and the IFPH
I have served on many internal and external committees and am keen to develop teaching and research partnerships internationally. I have been an Executive Member of the History Council of New South Wales since 2009, serving as Vice President for several years before becoming President in 2016. Trained in Britain, I moved to Australia in 2008 and revel in my capacity to research and network internationally. I have an extensive knowledge of the field of public history in Australia and Britain. My teaching and research of public history is international. I am passionate about teamwork involving international collaboration. I began a recent collaboration with the Centre for Public History at the University of Hamburg and I am half German (although I haven’t spoken German since my mother died over 20 years ago – I look forward to reacquainting myself with the language!). My French was once conversational but also requires some work.
My application is supported by Professor Paula Hamilton in Sydney Australia. Thank you!
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Serge Noiret (November 1, 2016). Four Candidates for the IFPH Steering Committee 2016 Elections. IFPH-FIHP. Retrieved February 9, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/pvn9
1 Response
[…] The IFPH Elections were closed on November 10, 2016 like we announced earlier in a post on this website. […]