Museum Meanderings

King Spear will come to your mill, steal all your grain and look creepy as all get out while he does it.  

There’s a lot you can say about The Henry Ford.  Here’s some of it.  

Posting this for emerging or established public humanities professionals in the Mid-Atlantic region (NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD & DC).  It is a modestly paid (but still paid!) blogger position, once a month, on the topic of your choosing.  Check out the call, pass along to people you think fit the call.  Deadline is November 2.  

Number three is the most useful for potential Museum Studies/Public History people, but the other three are useful as well.  And as the Spousal Unit says, “if you can’t get funding from a school, then don’t go to that school.”  

What’s the outlook in the field I want to work in?

This is a particularly sensitive question for those of us in the social sciences and humanities.  We find ourselves in endless conversations about how we should be smart enough to make money rather than live the not-lucrative life of the mind, and as a result of defensiveness can wind up putting on blinders to the actual conditions around us (see: “at least I’ll be doing something I enjoy”).  When PhDs in some fields can take close to a decade to attain, it’s nearly impossible to predict what the future job market will look like.  A classic example would be one of my undergraduate professors, who spent seven years training as a Soviet specialist at a time when those were in demand, only to find the Wall crumbling as he graduated.  After some despair, he remarketed himself as a post-Soviet specialist and found gainful employment.  These things are unpredictable, but it’s probably worth noting that if a field seems overcrowded now, it may be even more so by the time you graduate.  More debt + terrible outlook = extra depressing graduate school experience, sadly.

“On Friday, a group known as the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, formerly known as Friends of Science East, purchased 16 acres on eastern Long Island to create a Tesla museum and science center. Matt Inman, creator of the Web cartoon The Oatmeal, encouraged his readers to contribute to the non-profit’s purchase, calling its goal, “a simple feat… only expensive.” Inman set out to raise $850,000, but ended up raising close to $1.4 million for the establishment of what will be America’s first museum dedicated to scientist Nikola Tesla.”

Great ideas for making presentations in any discipline less snore-able and more participatory.  Linda’s post makes me think of THATCamp in more ways than one.