Dr. David Scobey

Concordia University History Department Annual Public History Lecture

Co-sponsored by the CEREV series “Current Issues in Museums, Heritage, and Public Cultural Work” and with generous support of Concordia’s MIGS and Art History Department.

The lecture will be accompanied by the temporary exhibit “Weaving a World” constructed from oral histories of the largely Franco-American millworkers of Lewiston-Auburn, Maine. The exhibit will be located in the atrium of the EV building, from March 17th – 24th.

David Scobey is Executive Dean of The New School for General Studies and Milano The New School For Management and Urban Policy at The New School.  Until August, 2010, he was the Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Professor of Community Partnerships and the inaugural Director of the Harward Center For Community Partnerships at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.  Prior to that, he was Associate Professor of Architecture in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and Director of the Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan.  Scobey holds a doctorate from Yale’s Program in American Studies.  His scholarship focuses on politics, culture, urbanism, and space in 19^th-century America, with a particular focus on Gilded-Age New York.  He is the author of Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Temple University Press, 2002) and numerous articles on 19^th-century U.S. cultural and urban history.  He has been the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, a Senior Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and other fellowships.

Since founding the Arts of Citizenship Program at Michigan fifteen years ago, Scobey has been committed to integrating civic and community engagement into history, the humanities and arts, and liberal education.  He has worked on numerous public history projects in collaboration with theater troupes, African-American heritage organizations, grass-roots museums, and other partners.  In 2004, he was a finalist for the Thomas Ehrlich Prize, a national faculty award given by Campus Compact for community-based teaching.  He serves on the national advisory committees for Project Pericles and was chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars In Public Life.