The University of Wisconsin–Madison is establishing a permanent center with a full-time staff to continue and expand on the work of its well-received Public History Project, according to a news release.
The new entity, to be called the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, will be housed within the Division for Teaching and Learning. Its staff will be devoted to educating the campus community about the university’s past in ways that will enrich the curriculum, inform administrative decisions, and bolster efforts to achieve a more equitable university.
The university anticipates having the new center up and running by mid-summer, which is when the Public History Project, designed as a limited initiative, will end.
Chancellor Emerita Blank commissioned the Public History Project in 2019 as one of several responses to a campus study group that investigated the history of two UW–Madison student organizations in the early 1920s that bore the name of the Ku Klux Klan. The project was charged with uncovering and giving voice to those who experienced and challenged bigotry and exclusion at UW–Madison and improved the university through their courage and actions.
Throughout the Public History Project, staff members and researchers, including many students, have published blog posts based on their findings. The project’s museum exhibition, called “Sifting and Reckoning: UW–Madison’s History of Exclusion and Resistance,” ran from Sept. 12 to Dec. 23, 2022, at the Chazen Museum of Art. It was viewed by 160 tour groups and logged 23,121 visits, making it one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum’s main gallery in recent years. The exhibition’s companion website has been viewed more than 12,000 times by people in 47 states and 44 countries.
