MA in Public History

One of the unique features of our program is the paid internship. Students work with a public history institution or on a public history project for a full academic term (Spring-Summer, Fall, or Winter of the second year). Students normally earn around $8,000 as salary as well as course credit (HIST 5703), but wages depend on the length of the internship and the funding model used by the employer. Over the past 20 years students have found work with over forty internship partners. In many cases their experience has led to further contract work after the internship is over and even long-term employment once their MA is completed.

Internships benefit from the “Capital advantage” because many faculty across a wide range of disciplines at Carleton have deep research links in the community. These relationships bring a good deal of synergy between the university and the wider community and our negotiations for paid internships draws from the trust established through such research collaborations. This also means that our paid internships often involve higher level work than is commonly experienced by interns, work study, and practicum students. It is the responsibility of the coordinator of the program to identify and explore internship possibilities and to link internship partners with students, but connections that students themselves have are often useful starting points for such negotiations.

Our students have worked in the national museums here in Ottawa, in many local and regional museums, in Library and Archives Canada as well as local city and corporate archives, for a great number of government departments, for Parks Canada and the National Capital Commission, for private corporations and non-profit organizations, for private historical research firms and so on. They have designed and curated exhibits, produced digital projects, conducted research and written scripts for living history programs, been the first to open, identify and create finding lists for archival collections, reviewed and developed outreach programs and so on. Occasionally we have place students outside of Ottawa and the National Capital Region.

We normally admit eight to ten new students every year. Your chances of success are increased if you can demonstrate a strong interest in public history, show that you have had some experience (paid and / or volunteer) working in public history sites (museums, heritage houses, archives etc.) and/or creative ways of engaging with history (creating exhibits or digital sites, participating in performances or film-making etc.). While most of our students have an undergraduate degree in History, some come to us with cu_people_degree in other disciplines.

When applying be sure to connect with your referees well ahead of time so they can write you an informed letter of recommendation. Be careful in choosing your writing sample – we do read all of them – and of course take care in writing your statement of interest. The writing sample should demonstrate your ability to conduct research and communicate analytical thinking. It should therefore come from a recent, senior undergraduate-level course and while essays are the normal type of writing sample, please contact the Program Co-ordinator, James Opp, if you wish to submit an alternative example of your work. Both the writing sample and the statement of interest play very important roles in the application process as it is where we really get to know who you are and what you would like to do. Besides speaking about yourself, your interests and your background, it is important to tell us in the statement of interest what you would like to do for your major research project with some precision. For example, telling us that you want to look into issues of historical accuracy in opera, perhaps using the Canadian Opera Company’s recent Louis Riel production as an example, will help us more than telling us you’ve always loved history and music and want to work on a topic that brings the two together. Of course, you’ll not be tied down to what you propose in your statement; many topics change once students begin to take courses and get to know faculty.

If you have any questions about applying please contact the Program Co-ordinator, Professor James Opp. For technical requirements related to admissions please contact the graduate administrator, Ms. Joan White.

Our Graduates

You will find our graduates working close to home in Ottawa, across Canada, and as far afield as India. They have found jobs in every conceivable type of public history work from federal, provincial and local archives to national and local museums, heritage houses and living history sites, corporations and non-profit organizations, and of course in academic institutions and government agencies. Some have set themselves up as contract researchers and editors, and several have gone on to do PhDs, not just here in Canada but also in the United States.

These recordings were made as phase one of the Carleton Centre for Public History’s Alumni Project where current students interview graduates from the program.

All the interviewers noted below are now themselves graduates. And this is just the beginning.

We are rolling out phase two over the next few months and well as profiles of all of our alumni and alumna so be sure to check back soon for more stories.

Alex Comber (now Military Archivist, Library and Archives Canada) talks with Lina Compton (now Program Officer, SSHRC).

Tom Bigelow (then Curatorial Assistant and now Procedural Clerk, House of Commons) and Natascha Morrison (researcher for Contentworks Inc) talk with Anna Kuntz (now Senior Associate, Know History)

Emily Lonie (then archivist with Library and Archives Canada and now City Archivist at the City of Coquitlam, BC) talks with Lauren Markewicz (now working at Elk Island National Park, Alberta and a noted blogger at History Research Shenanigans)

Joel Legassie (now completing his PhD on Japanese history at the University of Victoria) talks with Meghan Lundrigan (now completing her PhD on the holocaust and visual social media at Carleton).

Angela Beking (now Archival Assistant, Library and Archives Canada) talks to Sinead Cox (now Curator of Engagement and Dialogue at the Huron County Museum and Historic Gaol and one of the directors of Staging Our Histories)

The Garth Wilson Fellowship

Ingenium – Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation & Carleton’s MA in Public History

The Garth Wilson Fellowship in Public History is a 2-year fellowship offered by Ingenium and Carleton University’s Department of History. It celebrates our collaboration with Canada’s Science and Technology Museum and is in the memory of Garth Wilson (1960-2010) who was the Curator of Transportation at the museum from 1989 until 2010. He was a passionate advocate of museology with interest in public history, transportation history, and material culture. He was highly respected for the intelligence, imagination and discipline that he brought to the collecting of artifacts, writing and editing of professional and general interest publications, curating of exhibitions, and teaching of museum studies.

The Fellowship provides a graduate student with an excellent opportunity to participate in public history projects at a national museum, gain valuable work experience in this competitive field, and have unique access to materials that contribute to a student’s research interests. The funding supports training, research travel, conference participation, and on-line and print publications.

Garth Wilson Fellows:

• Sara McGillivray (2014-16)
• Phoebe Mannell (2016-17)
• Dany Guay-Belanger (2017-18)
• Cristina Wood (2018-19)
• Camas Clowater-Eriksson (2019-2020)
• Victoria Hawco (2020/2021)
• Jaime Simons (2021/2022)

As well as having the largest cluster of academic public historians in Canada, there are many faculty and graduate students at Carleton working in complementary fields. This means that our graduate students can take seminars and get research advice from colleagues in related disciplines such as Architecture (Steven Fai)  Anthropology and Sociology (Tonya Davidson), Art and Culture which includes Art History, Film Studies and Music (Carol Payne), Business (Leighann Neilson), Indigenous Studies and Canadian Studies (Peter Hodgins), Communications and Journalism (Miranda Brady), Law (Stacy Douglas), Public Policy (Frances Abele) and others. These are active relationships with colleagues whose work is widely read by public historians as you can see for yourself if you click on the names of just a few examples noted above.

When we think of the “Carleton Advantage” we are also thinking of the outstanding research and project work carried out within the framework of Carleton University Research Centres. The Carleton Centre for Public History is one, but others where public history work takes place include the Centre for Indigenous Research, Culture, Language and Education, the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies, and the Carleton Immersive Media Studio.

We also enjoy collaborations with colleagues in Migration and Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. There is obvious synergy between our MA program and Carleton’s prestigious MA in Heritage Conservation.

Besides the opportunity to take seminars and work with faculty and students in related fields, Carleton has recently developed two exciting programs that our students can take advantage of: the Diploma in Curatorial Studies and the Collaborative Masters in Digital Humanities. Things are always on the go at Carleton, for example there are discussions about collaboration across many disciplines, including public history, to develop work in performance and performance studies.

As you will see if you explore the profiles of our core and adjunct faculty, many of us collaborate and work with public historians across Ottawa and the national capital region. This means that many of our students are able to draw on expertise and knowledge from practitioners and historians working in our national and local museums, in government departments, in the National Capital Commission, and the many private research firms that employ historians to work in the regions archives and research collections from Library and Archives Canada to the Canadian Conservation Institute, from the City of Ottawa’s local history collections to the libraries and collections of the national museums. You will find our students exploring artifacts at the Canadian Museum of History, reading First World War diaries at the Canadian War Museum, or working through advertisements for domestic technologies at Canada’s Science and Technology Museum. They will be on the streets examining monuments and heritage buildings, participating (and sometimes leading) walking tours and they may be on our stages performing history through film, digital media, or theatre.

Our classrooms often involve active collaboration with public history practitioners through course based projects. Our students have curated online exhibits for Canada’s Science and Technology Museum, developed exhibit proposals for the same museum as well as the Canadian Agricultural Museum, the Canadian Aviation Museum, the Canadian War Museum, and the Canadian History Museum. They have created exhibits – online, travelling, and in situ – for many local museums and heritage organizations. Recently those in a museums and public memory seminar curated 17 installations across the city for the Ottawa-based Workers’ History Museum’s 2017 project. We’ve provided some links below to media coverage for you to learn more about such course based projects. Sometimes we collaborate with public history institutions beyond Ottawa and even Ontario, as with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

Finally, of course our Capital Advantage is experienced especially in our paid Internship program about which you can read more here:

• Students Collaborate with Curators at the Canadian Museum of History
• Workers’ History Museum’s Ottawa2017 project Capital History Kiosks