Historical Associations Issue Recommendations about Rewarding Public History Work for Promotion and Tenure

The AHA Council adopted “Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian,” a report offering best practices for evaluating public history scholarship in history departments, at its June 5 meeting. The report provides clear advice on evaluating public history work for college and university administrators, department chairs, and faculty. The National Council on Public History and the Organization of American Historians also adopted the joint report.

The report argues that public history work is generally overlooked in a “tenure process that emphasizes single-authored monographs and articles at the expense of other types of scholarly productions.” Despite increasing interest in public history, public scholarship, and other forms of civic engagement in colleges and universities, current standards for evaluating historical scholarship “do not reflect the great variety of historical practice undertaken by faculty members.” Even departments that hire faculty specifically to teach public history often neglect to reward those historians for carrying out the range of public history activities required in their jobs.

Read the full report and the related white paper.