In 1874, reflecting on how everyday moods colored his experience of Florence's cultural wonders, Henry James wrote: "In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask to be beguiled; on others ... to be edified."
It's a particular challenge of museum work: to present a collection that appeals to Saturday strollers and serious scholars alike. With their intellectual range, sense of context, and skills in intensive research, humanities Ph.D.s can offer museums, galleries, and cultural centers a nearly perfect professional background.
Several graduate students have explored museum careers through doctoral internships, financed in part by a grant program at our foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The program awards up to 30 grants a year to doctoral students who have created internships that engage their scholarship in a context outside of college teaching and research. While these small grants support scholarship beyond the academy in many career fields -- including foreign policy, fund raising, and social services -- a number of the awardees have sought out the challenges and rewards of museum work.
Another Venue for Research and Teaching
Katherine Zelljadt, a doctoral student in history at Harvard University, used her grant during a summer at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. By recreating tenement apartments, the museum explores the lives and times of immigrants to America at the turn of the last century. Ms. Zelljadt undertook intensive archival and documentary research on one 1890s family who lived in what is now the museum's building.
Ms. Zelljadt had extensive research experience, of course, but genealogical research was new to her. "Looking for ordinary people, people who are not famous or notable, differs greatly from much historical archival research on known topics," she says. "I learned the ins and outs of genealogical resources in New York, an invaluable skill, because a significant number of Americans entered the country through the city's harbor." She also remembers the personal elation of finding a name that was familiar to her among the hundreds. Ms. Zelljadt synthesized her research into a resource guide for museum docents and schoolteachers.
Jeffrey Rangel, a graduate student in the American-culture program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, took a doctoral internship at Self Help Graphics in East Los Angeles that reinforced his commitment to scholarship. At this community-based visual-arts center, which presents and promotes Chicano art and culture, Mr. Rangel used his extensive training in U.S./Chicano history to identify and preserve archival materials for a major retrospective exhibition.
Charged with making sense of the center's large stacks of past exhibition announcements and fliers, Mr. Rangel found the curatorial work a good use of his experience with archival research. "Superficially, the work consisted of grouping like materials with one another," he says, but it appealed to his "love of sitting in archives, immersed in the stories they tell. It reaffirmed my commitment to some of the more traditional aspects of scholarly work." He was also faced with decisions about what to save, what to discard, and what to group with other materials -- "significant decisions driven by an ideological perspective about what constitutes relevant art-historical material."
Museum work also resonates with university teaching, since it entails educational practice as well as research and writing. Rebecca Tortello, a Ph.D. candidate in comparative education and sociology at Columbia University, wanted to learn about making museum visits entertaining and educational for families and schools, so she chose to intern with the education department of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, Calif.
To help develop a family activity guide for the museum's newly installed Chinese Ceramics Galleries, Ms. Tortello examined family-oriented teaching tools at museums nationwide, worked on a prototype, and wrote the final guide. The internship is now paying off in her academic work. "The guide required me to develop material based on topics of which I have no expert knowledge," she reports. "The research I conducted and my conversations with the educational-programs manager strengthened my ability to frame theory and practice in a meaningful way. It has helped me be a more effective teacher, too."
The Practical and the Public
Museum work, despite some similarities to academic work, also involves some significant differences, especially in the realm of public outreach. Tim Lindgren found himself exploring immigrant history during his internship with Dreams of Freedom, a multimedia exhibit that was then under development by the International Institute of Boston. Working with the institute team during his Ph.D. work in English at Boston College, Mr. Lindgren studied local immigration history, wrote and edited immigration narratives, and developed educational programs. As the exhibit opened, however, Mr. Lindgren found himself assembling furniture, selling tickets, acting as docent, and planning special tours. Not quite what one might expect from a Ph.D.-level internship? Mr. Lindgren has no complaints. "This wide range of responsibilities kept me nimble," he says, "and provided a ground-level perspective on how a museum passes from idea to reality in everyday increments."
Tameka Bradley Hobbs, a doctoral student in history at Florida State University, did not create but rather disassembled an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture. In taking apart an exhibition called "When the Spirit Moves: The Africanization of American Dance" and returning its components to the museum's newly renovated facility, Ms. Hobbs got hands-on experience with preservation issues. The work made her think more deeply about what goes into an exhibit.
"Once you are exposed to what is involved in the creation of an exhibit, the magic and mystery are stripped away," she says. "Exhibits are no longer merely fantastic creations; they are the result of careful collections management, research, craftsmanship, and much intellectual energy."
Even with this new behind-the-scenes perspective, visitors' reaction to the exhibit deeply touched Ms. Hobbs: "It helped to reinforce in my mind that museums serve as a crucial link between the general public and the study of history."
In a recent WRK4US discussion forum on museum careers, Jim Holton, a history Ph.D. from George Washington University and a historical consultant for museums, points out that "people consume history for a variety of reasons: some for nostalgia, some out of academic interest, for personal enrichment, and so on. Public history teaches us that we can't expect there to be only one message."
For Mr. Rangel, work on the Chicano art exhibition not only demonstrated the existence and value of scholarly opportunities outside the academy but also reaffirmed his conviction "that scholars have a significant role to play in ensuring the vitality of the diverse cultural expression emerging from community arts institutions." Ms. Zelljadt also saw afresh the larger impact of the humanities: "It is essential to believe that what interests you reverberates with other types of people. If more Ph.D. students could and would communicate their interests to others, the public would begin to see humanities not just as 'reading literature in college' or as a weekend hobby, but as a powerful and vital force in our society."
Mr. Lindgren's experience taught him that "it takes not only a vision and courage to generate good ideas, but also dogged perseverance and hard-thinking pragmatism to make the ideas work." This "firsthand experience with how significant ideas are transformed into real-world programs and organizations," he says, "is vital not only for those attempting to envision non-academic applications for graduate training, but for anyone who takes seriously the relationship between the life of the mind and world outside the academy."
Finding and Getting the Jobs
At a moment when a growing number of cities are cultivating the lucrative cultural tourism market, career possibilities in museums abound. In the same WRK4US forum on museum careers, Cheryl Brookshear, curator of education for a historic house in Wisconsin, writes: "Large museums use a wide variety of graduates since they have numerous departments. Regardless of your field you can do something in a museum." Ph.D.'s interested in such careers have a range of options even if they don't immediately see the connections. The necessary expertise, says Ms. Brookshear, varies widely depending on the museum's mission and focus. Although she cautions that "the museum field is very crowded, as there are many ways to enter the field," Kevin Britz, vice president for programs at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Ore., points out that "once one enters the museum world, employment opportunities are readily available if you are willing to work anywhere in a variety of places and institutions."
So intriguing and challenging were their experiences that Ms. Zelljadt, Mr. Lindgren, and many of the other graduate students supported by our grants continued their museum work beyond the end of the internship. For scholars who want to introduce their work to larger, broader audiences than is possible in the academy, the short step into a museum career may, indeed, be both beguiling and edifying.
