This episode kicks off a series focusing on Gallery Lab, an exciting initiative here at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage that invites graduate students and their collaborators to curate, perform, and organize an exciting array of exhibitions, events, and activities. You can read more about Gallery Lab in the Brown Daily Herald and check out the full calendar of events here.
Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet stopped by Public Work to talk about “Monument Worthy,” an exhibition they curated on the topic of “personal memory markers.” Hear Hannah and Molly talk with Jim and Amelia about the monuments and debates informing their work, the forms of monuments to personal memory that were revealed in their exhibition, and the ways we remember, erase, and interrogate history through our relationships to material objects large and small.
Hannah Mooney is a first year in the Public Humanities Master’s Program, who is interested in public history, museum education, and historic preservation. Aside from Public Work, her favorite podcast is 2 Dope Queens. For tweets related to museums and history, or more likely dogs, you can follow her @hannahemooney.
Molly Pailet is a first-year student in the MA Public Humanities Program. She is passionate about applied history, non-traditional education, and creating opportunities for engagement and connection. Her favorite podcast is The Mortified Guide, because she too has a very embarrassing collection of journals that the historian in her can’t bear to get rid of…primary source documents! Check her out on Twitter @akimboflamingo.
You can find every episode of Public Work on iTunes, and you can listen via the Anchor embed below (or find and download episodes on our Anchor page). We’ve also backed up every episode of Public Work in Brown University’s Digital Repository for long-term preservation.
Episode 03: Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet on Monuments and Memory by Public Work: a public humanities podcast
Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet stopped by Public Work to talk about “Monument Worthy,” an exhibition they curated on the topic of “personal memory markers.” Hear Hannah and Molly talk with Jim and Amelia about the monuments and debates informing their work, the forms of monuments to personal memory that were revealed in their exhibition, and the ways we remember, erase, and interrogate history through our relationships to material objects large and small.
Show Notes
Learn more about Itaru Sasaki’s phone booth (mentioned by Molly) at This American Life and CityLab.
New Orleans Mayor Rich Landrieu’s speech on the removal of Confederate monuments (mentioned by Hannah) can be found online: here is a transcript and here is video.
When asked for reading recommendations on monuments and memory, Molly and Hannah mention Erika Doss’ Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010) and Dell Upton’s What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (2015).
The music on this episode is excerpted from the song “New Day” by Lee Rosevere (licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)