The Public History Program within the Rutgers University New Brunswick History Department offers students, faculty, and staff opportunities to participate in public historical engagement through coursework, experiential learning, events, and collaborative projects. Students have the opportunity to engage with current debates around contested histories, work alongside community partners to share historical information with diverse audiences, and to learn more about the myriad methods and fields in which historians work. The program offers an undergraduate Certificate in Public History with exciting course offerings, and an experiential learning Public History Internship program, which connects students with opportunities to work and learn hands-on in the field of public history.
Rutgers public history students build impressive resumes of empowering research, interpretation, presentation, and outreach engagement. In recent years, these students have participated in the curation of exhibits at Rutgers Special Collections and the New Brunswick Free Public Library, collaborated with the Humanities Action Lab, consulted on the construction of mobile apps featuring historical data, created and offered historical walking tours of the Rutgers campus as part of the Scarlet and Black Project, and more.
Rutgers Oral History Archive
The Rutgers Oral History Archive records the personal narratives of:
– Men and women (either New Jersey residents and/or Rutgers University alumni, faculty or staff) who served on the home front and overseas during World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the nation’s most recent conflicts
– People with a story to tell about some aspect of New Jersey’s proud history, its towns and cities, its diverse populations, organizations within the Garden State and/or social/cultural movements and events
– Men and women who helped shape the history of Rutgers University as students, alumni, faculty, staff and in other roles
Rutgers Initiative for the Book
Starting in fall 2019, the Rutgers Book Initiative will provide a home for talks and workshops on the history of the book; will build a collection of bibliographical examples and a book arts makerspace; will support graduate and undergraduate classes that draw on the Mason Gross School’s letterpress as well as on library collections in New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia; will develop “tool swapping” through teaching exchanges within and beyond Rutgers; and will develop a graduate certificate in book history as well as graduate student internships in area libraries.
Rutgers Institute for High School Teachers
Founded in 1988, the Rutgers Institute for High School Teachers represents a collaboration between New Jersey’s secondary teachers and the faculty of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Each year we offer new and varied seminars focusing on classroom usable topics in the social sciences and humanities. Participants explore the use of primary documents and teaching aids (such as videos, images, and electronic resources) as well as the latest scholarship. We help educators meet state-mandated teaching standards and provide certificates for professional development credit. It has been a privilege to partner with New Jersey’s teachers for the past 25 years.
American Studies Department’s New Jersey Folk Festival
The Rutgers University Department of American Studies presents the New Jersey Folk Festival on the grounds of the Cook Campus every year on the last Saturday in April. The festival a free event open to the public. Begun in 1975 by founding director Dr. Angus Gillespie, the festival is planned with the help of student interns of Rutgers University under the direction of Dr. Carla Cevasco and Dr. Maria Kennedy, both faculty members of the Department of American Studies. Each year, the festival features ethnic, occupational, and cultural heritage in New Jersey through music, dance, heritage demonstrations, seminars, and children’s activities. The festival has been incorporated into campus-wide events of Rutgers Day since 2009 and represents a significant campus-community partnership between the traditional artists and peoples of New Jersey, the Rutgers campus community, and the general public. The event has empowered community leaders to contribute to the artistic direction of the festival as consultants and artists, and through a partnership with an independent non profit, The New Jersey Folk Festival Inc. Its curricular objectives offer leadership and intellectual opportunities to Rutgers students in the public humanities through American Studies courses in Folk Festival Curation, Folk Festival Management, and American Folklore. The festival’s forty-five year legacy of providing cultural engagement, practical experience and intellectual rigor to its community, student, and faculty participants is a highlight of Rutgers’ contributions to public humanities in the university.
NJ Spark Social Justice Journalism Lab
NJ Spark is a social justice journalism lab at Rutgers University. We bring students together with media makers and journalists to create media for and with underserved communities. We tell the stories of the working class, immigrants, and impoverished. We shine a light on the organizations that support those groups. We point to the inequality and injustice plaguing our society. At our core, we believe that when people come together to re-imagine their communities, it can spark real change.
See the projects tab for more exciting initiatives.