What is the capital advantage?
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: