ashp-admin
March 5, 2024
The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning is hiring a new team member! If you have experience developing and coordinating digital history projects and a passion for teaching history, apply to become our Assistant Director of Digital Projects. Keep reading for the job description and application information.
Position Overview:
The American Social History Project/Center for Media & Learning (ASHP/CML) is seeking a resourceful project director, with strong organizational and fundraising skills and an interest in public history and history education as an Assistant Director for Digital Projects to develop and produce a wide range of educational materials and professional development programs focusing on American history and culture. The Assistant Director will report to the Executive Director. ASHP/CML also leads other programs at the Graduate Center such as the New Media Lab. A staff position, the Assistant Director for Digital Projects focuses on developing, coordinating, and fundraising for digital projects. This is a one-year full-time position with continuation dependent on funding. Graduate Center policy currently requires staff to work in-person at least seventy-percent of the time.
Qualifications:
Minimum Qualifications: Masters Degree
Preferred Qualifications:
● Strong administrative skills including project management
● Detail oriented and highly organized
● High school or college teaching experience is desirable
● Good communication skills
● Experience with fundraising and grant writing
● Expertise developing and producing digital programs
ASHP/CML, a research center based at the City University of New York Graduate Center at Fifth Avenue & 34th Street in Manhattan, produces historical texts, documentaries, and digital projects for students, teachers, and the public. ASHP/CML conducts professional development programs for middle and high school teachers and college faculty focused on new historical scholarship and active-learning pedagogy. Currently ASHP/CML is a major partner in several federally funded National Endowment for the Humanities projects and works with WNET on a history gaming series for middle-school students.ASHP/CML also oversees the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab, a facility for students and faculty to produce digital projects. Please go to http://ashp.cuny.edu and nml.cuny.edu for more information.
Details at a Glance
Time Commitment: Full Time Schedule – 40 hours/week
Application Deadline: Open until filled
Start Date: Review of applications will begin on March 1 and continue until the position is filled.
Professional Level: Advanced
Education: Advanced degree in U.S. History or related field required
Salary $85,000-$95,000 depending on prior experience Benefits This position comes with benefits. Level of Language Proficiency Fluent in English.
Location: On-Site American Social History Project, 365 Fifth Avenue, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY 10016, United States
To apply: Please email (no phone calls please) a cover letter, resume, and names and contact information for three professional references to: ASHP/CML Assistant Director Search The Graduate Center/CUNY Attention: Donna Thompson Ray Email Address: cml@gc.cuny.edu
ASHP/CML/CUNY is an equal opportunity/affirmative action/Americans with Disabilities Act employer.
The NML assists doctoral students from across academic disciplines to create digital projects or tools to support their scholarly research and teaching. Lab projects integrate digital technologies into traditional academic practice, challenging scholars to develop fresh questions in their respective fields using the tools of new technology. Visit the New Media Lab website to learn about upcoming meetings and for information about how to become involved.
Rachel Pitkin is a first-year PhD student in History at the GC. Her current research interests include public and urban history, and history of women and gender in the twentieth century United States. Rachel comes to the GC with a background in education, and in teaching history/social studies. She holds an MA in Museum Studies and an MA in History, and she is a longtime volunteer at the LGBT Community Center National History Archives. As a Graduate Assistant during the fall 2022 semester, Rachel will support the ASHP/CML’s ongoing work to disseminate materials from the LGBTQ+ Histories of the United States summer institute.
In May, Director of Online Programs Peter Mabli presented Who Built America: The OER––ASHP/CML’s upcoming free and publicly-accessible version of the WBA textbook with interactive charts and content from History Matters––at the National Council of Public History’s Annual Conference. His presentation was part of an online roundtable discussion among public historians who have created open educational resources, digital monographs and edited collections, and other digital publications. Other participants included representatives from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the Smithsonian, and the Universities of Maryland and Cincinnati.
The discussants outlined reasons for publishing open access resources digitally and provided unvarnished reflections on their processes of development. Major issues addressed in the roundtable included the benefits of OERs in post-COVID remote learning formats, accessibility and audience considerations, and maintenance of online content. Peter discussed lessons learned from ASHP/CML’s ongoing work to produce WBA: The OER, including the need to program a structured backend database with a simplified administrator interface in order to handle the project’s multiple types of materials and present them consistently and effectively to users.
The roundtable was well received by both participants and the online audience and shed light on each organization’s project as well as the benefits and challenges of publishing online.
For the second year, ASHP/CML has received a small grant to participate in CUNY’s LGBTQIA+ Consortium. With funding from the City Council of NYC, the Consortium supports LGBTQIA+ training, education, programming, and archives at 14 campuses. At the Graduate Center, participants include CLAGS: the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Mina Rees Library, and the Public Science Project. Stayed tuned for announcements of future programs funded through this initiative.
Work is ongoing on “Past/Present,” our AHA-funded project to create teaching resources and primary source collections that help educators link history to current events. The new collections of materials will be available by the end of this school year on Social History for Every Classroom, ASHP/CML’s online resource database for K-12 educators.
Over the summer we met with teams of teachers from across the country and educational advisors to discuss the use of history to teach current events, explore pedagogical best practices, and brainstorm themes for new collections of teaching materials.
These brainstorming sessions provided ASHP/CML with a rich array of topics and approaches to develop the new collections. We are currently compiling possible sources and finalizing the pedagogical approaches for each collection. We will share our drafts with the teams to get their feedback this fall and hope to make the materials publicly available, via Social History for Every Classroom, early next year.
This summer thirty middle and high school teachers from throughout the United States joined the ASHP/CML for a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Summer Institute on LGBTQ+ Histories of the United States. For two weeks in July, participants met virtually for presentations by noted scholars and archivists, and for hands-on workshops focused on teaching about LGBTQ+ history. The institute introduced the rich body of recent scholarship covering the span of U.S. history, from early America to the 1990s, and engaged sources suited for classroom use, including military and government records, oral history interviews, literature, photography, and organizational archives. Several live “Q&A” sessions with archivists featured nationally renowned cultural institutions: New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York, NY), the New York Public Library’s LGBTQ Initiative, and the Lesbian Herstory Archive.
Participating teachers appreciated the opportunity to learn more about a topic that had been omitted from their own formal education and to strategize with colleagues about ways to effectively include LGBTQ+ topics in their own courses. At the conclusion of the institute, one teacher reflected, “I will use the materials, information, and connections to people that I acquired from this institute for the rest of my teaching career. I’ve already planned lessons for the fall that I plan to use and adapt as I teach and learn about my new students and their needs.” And another agreed, “I cannot wait to share this information with my students and fellow teachers.”
As part of the NEH grant, our work now shifts to dissemination. In the coming year, we will develop a website with recordings of selected presentations by scholars, primary documents, teaching modules, and bibliographic resources. In addition, we will host several upcoming webinars focused on teaching strategies and LGBTQ+ materials.
ASHP/CML will host a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded institute in Summer 2023 for 25 college and university teachers to study the visual culture of the American Civil War and its aftermath. This sixth iteration of the institute will focus on the era’s array of visual media—including the fine arts, ephemera, photography, cartoons, maps, and monuments—to examine how information and opinion about the war and its impact were recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped views before, during, and after the conflict.
The two week institute, July 10-July 21, 2023, will include presentations by noted historians, art historians, and archivists, covering new scholarship related to Civil War and Reconstruction-era visual culture and discussing ways to use visual evidence to enhance scholarship and teaching. Participants also will enjoy hands-on sessions in major New York museums and archival collections, plus time to prepare individual projects, undertake research in local archives, and meet with the three principal institute faculty members, Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, and Gregory Downs. Other presenters include Matthew Fox-Amato, Louise Bernard, Michele Bogart, Ashton Gonzalez, Hilary Green, Lauren Hewes, Dominique Jean-Louis, Turkiya Lowe, Amy Mooney, Susan Schulten, Scott Manning Stevens, and Heather Williams.
Information about applying and the institute program will be available in November at: https://ashp.cuny.edu.
Resources and activities from previous institutes are available online on The Visual Culture of the American Civil War website. The site features video lectures and related picture galleries, primary documents, and print and multimedia bibliographies.
This summer, ASHP/CML Executive Director was one of several scholars who shared reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization. You can see these responses on the Graduate Center’s news page.