I hold a degree in history from Indiana University. For three years I taught different versions of U.S. history—standard, ESL, inclusion, AP, IB History of the Americas—and AVID at West Charlotte High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Various personal and professional experiences got me thinking about how individuals and communities think about the past, where they encounter “history,” and the challenges of making these processes accessible and meaningful. I will earn my masters degree in public humanities from Brown University in the spring of 2009. While my interests have often shot off in all directions, the core of my academic study has been how to craft enriching educational programs and experiences that deliver humanities, especially history, scholarship and make it relevant for diverse audiences.

I co-developed and presented The Public Humanities Toolbox with public humanities student Al Lees (http://publichumanitiestoolbox.wordpress.com). We presented this work at the 2009 National Council on Public History and will present it at the Massachusetts History Conference sponsored by Mass Humanities in June 2009. The website and handbook seek to show small cultural heritage organizations how to use easy web tools to create great websites. We have developed a model of an organization’s online presence based on the free or very inexpensive tools that have been developed in the last few years. These features do not enable every type of online activity possible (though they come darn close!). However, we have identified the most common functions that a small cultural heritage organization might expect of its website and some of the most exciting possibilities among recent web applications. We developed the Public Humanities Toolbox also knowing that not all features would be equally desirable to different users. We were also aware that our tools should be easy for the novice to build and for the end-user to navigate. Our principal goal is to create a rich interactive web-based framework of existing free and open source applications that can be used by small cultural heritage organizations to develop an engaging web presence. We hope that our ideas and model are, above all, useful. We hope that they help small organizations find and build audiences and that in doing so they and their collections become a vital part of their communities.

I have been involved with several projects at the John Nicholas Brown Center. I organized and moderated the panel "The Politics of Sex Education in Rhode Island" in conjunction with the 2008 exhibit Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Sexual Education in the 20th Century. I served as curatorial assistant for the 2008 traveling exhibit Jews & Comics: The New Generations. For Art+History, the 2009 exhibit curated by Meg Rotzel and Rosie Branson Gill, I worked with Miranda Summers to develop an educational program for 4th--6th graders. The curriculum and site visit Place Explorations can be found at http://artplushistory.wordpress.com. I also created the Art+History website using the tools described in The Public Humanities Toolbox. This is an example of how public humanities students support each other's work and continually provide new forums for experimentation in the public humanities.

In spring of 2009, I have been interning with the 1772 Foundation, helping to prepare grant applications for the board of trustees and researching a separate project on the possibilities of the foundation sponsoring classroom oral history projects. In the summer of 2008 I interned with the education department at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington. I worked to revise, rewrite, and write new materials for teachers and students, to create and present a traveling kit related to the exhibit American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music, as well as offer suggestions for how to update the Education Department's website.