Faculty

UNCW Public History faculty members are committed teachers, researchers, and advocates.

Tammy S. Gordon, Director of the UNCW Public History Program, teaches courses in museum education, museum exhibition, and collections theory and practice. She is the author of Private History in Public: Exhibition and the Settings of Everyday Life and the forthcoming The Spirit of 1976: Commerce, Community, and the Politics of Commemoration (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). She is an advocate for small museums and a former exhibits curator.

Dr. Gordon speaking at the opening reception for the student- and community-curated photography exhibit Flashback: Community Life Through the Lens of Mack Munn. Dr. Gordon’s students produced the exhibit in collaboration with the Lower Bladen Columbus Historical Society.

Robert Hart, an environmental and southern historian, teaches classes and conducts research on the intersection of culture and ecology.  He is especially interested in cultural and historic landscapes.  His most recent article, accepted for publication by Environmental History, explores the way opponents of the New Deal linked conservation and historic preservation to oppose a hydroelectric project in South Carolina.  He also focuses on longleaf pine and wetland ecosystems in the South.  He has been involved for the last ten years in an extensive longleaf pine restoration project near Charleston.  Hart frequently takes his classes into the field to explore the environment of the Carolinas and has informally consulted with public historians at a historic plantation in South Carolina as they seek to make race and the environment part of the park’s interpretative framework.

Dr. Hart specializes in both environmental and public history

Jarrod Tanny is Assistant Professor and the Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Fellow in Jewish History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, focusing on Russian and Jewish history. His monograph, City of Rogues and Schnorrers (Indiana University Press, 2011), examines how the city of Odessa was mythologized as a Jewish city of sin, celebrated and vilified for its Jewish gangsters, bawdy musicians, and comedians. Dr. Tanny’s teaching and research interests include popular culture and collective memory. His current project focuses on Jewish humor in America.