Public History PhD candidate, Sylvia Bailey, awarded Humanities Without Walls Fellowship
We are proud to announce that Public History PhD candidate, Sylvia Bailey, was awarded the Humanities Without Walls Fellowship. Humanities Without Walls is a consortium of humanities center and institutes at 15 major research universities.
The fellowship will enable Sylvia to travel to Chicago this summer for a 3 weeks in-residence professional development workshop, which includes talks and field trips that will teach participants how to leverage their skills and training towards careers outside academia. Speakers from the private sector, non-profit world, public media and many other fields will be brought in to explain how their knowledge might be of interest to employers in career fields they hadn’t even thought of.
In Sylvia’s fellowship application, she wrote about Public History and how it already is “without walls” since it applies history to the public. However public historians are still in an academic field and it can be difficult to leave academia and apply their learning to the real world. Says Sylvia, “I really enjoy academia and teaching, but considering the job market, there might be really valuable possibilities that I don’t even know about yet. I want to keep my options open.”
The History Department offers professional development workshops to its students, but Sylvia plans to utilize the knowledge and training she gets from her summer workshop to shape future workshops in the department.
Sylvia is currently working on her dissertation which looks at how the Holocaust as a global memory is utilized differently in national museums in the United States and Germany. Her particular focus is how transnational influences have shaped these museums, and subsequently have contributed to individual national narratives about the Holocaust. She expects to graduate in 2021.
