Project

Appointed as Manager of Curatorial Innovation, National Trust for Historic Preservation

Program

Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows

PhD field of study

PhD, History, George Washington University

Position Description

The National Trust for Historic Preservation works to save America’s historic places. Its mission is to protect significant places representing our diverse cultural experience by taking direct action and inspiring broad public support. The Manager of Curatorial Innovation seeks out new stories, connections, and themes within the National Trust’s collection of more than 60,000 items located at 21 museum properties throughout the United States. This collection includes fine arts and decorative arts from the eighteenth-twentieth centuries, as well as textiles, archival materials, and ordinary household objects. The manager has full digital access to this collection and is charged with developing new scholarship on both individual items in the collections as well as on the social, political, and cultural themes that cut across the collection. Working as a key member of the Historic Sites Department, the manager develops and implements digital resources to feed the new online portal for the collection and other platforms, and also develops public programming at selected sites to engage the public with this collection in unprecedented ways.