MY CURRENT POSITION is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Public History Program. My primary responsibilities are associated with the Public History Program, where I advise the graduate students pursuing a Master of Arts degree in the Historic Preservation track. My teaching and research interests include:

• American social and environmental history
• historical memory and popular culture
• historic preservation from the perspectives of social history and vernacular architecture
• African-American heritage preservation
• the history of the historic preservation and environmental movements in the United States
• professionalizing the study and interpretation of local history

MY PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT EXPERIENCE includes five years in Honolulu on the faculty of the Department of American Studies at the University of Hawaii and three years as a practicing preservationist and historical consultant in the Pacific Northwest, prior to coming to South Carolina in 1992. I have served on the boards of directors for a number of state-wide non-profit heritage organizations, including the Washington State Trust for Historic Preservation, the Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation, the South Carolina African American Heritage Council, and the citizen advisory board for the commission charged with building a monument to African-Americans on the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse, which was dedicated in March 2001.

MY EDUCATION includes undergraduate study at Dartmouth College and history degrees from the University of California, Berkeley: B.A. (1974), M.A. (1979), and Ph.D. (1984).

IN MY WORK AS A PUBLIC HISTORIAN, I have written about a diverse range of subjects that includes the history of historic urban parks in Honolulu, community studies in Washington State, labor history and historic preservation, Cold War sites in South Carolina, the history of national parks in the United States, efforts to commemorate the modern civil rights movement, an analysis of the current vogue for the present to apologize for past injustices, and the history of historic preservation. Much of my work has explored issues central to historic sites today: the challenges of doing public history in communities with historical secrets and the opportunities for remembering chapters of the past that are controversial.

Most recently, I have written a landscape history of Honolulu's "Central Park," from its royal origins through its on-going preservation and restoration efforts. I have also written a book about the history of the American preservation movement that focuses on the evolution of a local organization that achieved an unusual degree of national influence, the Historic Charleston Foundation. Historic Preservation for a Living City (University of South Carolina Press, 2000) traces the history of this non-profit organization over the last five decades, seeking to look frankly at the theme of preservation and the politics of race in a southern city. Within the curriculum of the Public History Program at USC, students can learn more about the historic city of Charleston through our Charleston preservation and museums field school.

In general the kinds of issues that I take up in my work include:

• space and place as ways to analyze the past
• race, class, and gender in historic preservation
• the process of historical reconciliation: how societies come to terms with their pasts
• engaging, rather than avoiding, controversy at historic sites