The Public History Collective (PHC), an interdisciplinary group based in the history program at
the CUNY Graduate Center, invites proposals for our second annual conference, to be held on
Friday, November 17, 2017. This event is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the PhD Program in History .
The PHC welcomes proposals of 500 words or less that engage with this year’s conference
theme: “It’s Not What You Think: Challenging Assumptions Through Public History.” Submissions
may include individual papers/presentations, complete panels, workshops, or other
nontraditional formats.

This year’s conference will consider the ways in which the assumptions that our audiences bring
with them affect the stories we choose to tell. Visitors to museums, cultural institutions,
archives, and other public history sites often come with preconceived assumptions about our
past shaped by distant experiences of high school courses, patriotic political rhetoric, or popular
myth. How can public historians challenge these myths and articulate new narratives while living
up to the expectations of the public in a diverse and increasingly polarized country? How can the
form and function of public history sites be used to expand conceptions of what spaces should
look like and who they should engage with? Overall, how can public history be a tool for
challenging previous knowledge, complicating beliefs, reversing expectations, broadening
perspectives, righting wrongs, and presenting a more honest history?

Submissions due Friday, September 15, 2017 to cunyphc@gmail.com.
Please direct questions to conference chair Madeline DeDe-Panken at cunyphc@gmail.com.

The Public History Collective is an interdisciplinary student-led group based in the history program at the CUNY Graduate
Center. We are committed to bridging the worlds of public history and academia. We aim to increase graduate student
participation in archives, museums, and other public history institutions, and to use that experience to broaden the methods
with which we teach and do academic work. Learn more about our work at https://publichistorycollective.wordpress.com