Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 10:00 AM – 06:00 PM
Room C198 and Rooms C201/C202

Join us for The CUNY Public History Collective’s Second Annual Conference, “It’s Not What You Think: Challenging Assumptions Through Public History,” featuring Keynote speaker Sarah Henry, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Museum of the City of New York.

The conference hopes to address how public history can be a tool for challenging previous knowledge, complicating beliefs, reversing expectations, broadening perspectives, righting wrongs, and presenting a more honest history.

Visitors to museums, cultural institutions, archives, and other public history sites often come with preconceived assumptions about the past shaped by distant experiences of high school courses, patriotic political rhetoric, or popular myth. The conference will ask how public historians can challenge these myths and articulate new narratives while living up to the expectations of the public in a diverse and increasingly polarized country. We will also explore how the form and function of public history sites can be used to expand conceptions of what cultural spaces should look like and who they should engage with.

Co-sponsored by the Public History Collective Working Group.