One strand of my research looks at debates about the role of intellectuals in American political culture after World War II. I am interested in the anxieties and hopes aroused by the presence of intellectuals in public life, as well as the way in which the role of the intellectual was constructed and reconstructed in relation to those anxieties and hopes. A second strand of my scholarship addresses the public history of the Rochester region. In particular, I am interested in the prospects of a “usable past” at the local level—a public engagement with history that may nourish civic, cultural, and economic renewal. An overriding concern with modes of intervention by academics in American democratic culture weaves together the two strands of my research agenda. I think often about the overlap between the “public historian” and the “public intellectual.”
I am intrigued by GBL/PBL as both a teacher and a scholar. As a teacher, I am on the lookout for new ways of enhancing students’ learning. I regularly use projects as culminating assignments in my classes, and my sense is that I could extend project-based learning from a solo endeavor at the end of the semester to a class-wide mode of learning throughout the semester. In particular, I would like to identify student projects that not only result in students’ learning but also in a tangible piece of public engagement. Could student projects, for example, make significant contributions to local public history? This question intersects with my interest in civically engaged scholarship. To what extent can projects that we do within the academy become sites for dialogue and partnership with the community?
I often make analogies to popular computer games in my lectures, and these moments seem to pique student interest. As someone concerned with how students learn about history, I recognize that these games are frequently young people’s first and most intensive engagement with historical content. A critical approach to historical games—understanding how game dynamics can both represent and distort historical conditions—might be a helpful prelude to projects in which students not only play such games but design them as pedagogical tools for helping others learn about history. I am also interested in how games can map onto historical landscapes, like the re-creation of 1920s Rochester by Trent’s class. To what extent can games recover historical spaces and, through games that require students to move through those spaces (virtually or “IRL”), foster historical preservation and ultimately a “sense of place”?
