Doctoral Graduate Matt Champagne Awarded Postdoctoral Fellowship

Dr. Matt Champagne, a specialist in queer public history and Spring 2024 graduate of the Public History Doctoral Program, has accepted a postdoctoral opportunity with the National Trust for Historic Preservation: the Queer History Postdoctoral Fellowship. The National Trust oversees 27 sites with many having connections to queer history. During the term of the fellowship, Dr. Champagne will work on a story map featuring queer history across all 27 sites. He will also assess interpretation at The Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut and Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana and provide guidance on how the Trust may fully develop its interpretive strategies for a fuller understanding of the queer past. He will also provide staff training in researching and interpreting LGBTQIA history.

In March of 2024, Dr. Champagne defended his dissertation Things Not Allowed in the House: Interpreting the Queer Past at Museums and Historic Sites, a taxonomical analysis of interpretive approaches at sites related to queer history. By analyzing tours, exhibits, interviews with interpretive and administrative staff, visitor reviews, and scholarship on interpretation, historical memory, and queer history, Champagne demonstrates “the implicit and explicit ways institutional homophobia and transphobia plague traditional public history theory and practice. [The dissertation] also highlights some institutions that confront these problematic approaches; through which, Things Not Allowed in the House shows how some museums and historic sites are made into safe places for queer people to seek out their past.” Dissertation committee members Tammy Gordon (HI, chair), Alicia McGil (HI), Ebony Jones (HI), and Perver Baran (PRT) noted how Champagne’s work breaks new ground by documenting both effective and problematic interpretive techniques and by providing concrete, evidence-based guidance for public historians interpreting queer history.

Currently, Dr. Champagne is the Manager of Learning, Interpretation, and Engagement at Surratt House Museum, a site of enslavement in southern Maryland with ties to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He will also be the keynote speaker at Concord Pride 24 in Concord, Massachusetts and is scheduled for talks on interpreting queer history at Marietta House Museum and Montpelier House Museum.