Assignment Overview

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Where I teach at Illinois State University, more than 75% of majors in the history department are pursuing degrees in History-Social Sciences Teacher Education. This course of study prepares and certifies students to teach history and other social science courses in Illinois high schools – in fact, the majority of history teachers in the state graduate from our program. When designing my syllabus for a course taken mostly by second-year majors on nineteenth-century European history, I wanted to make a case to my students that they could make Europe’s nineteenth century – the Victorian world – relevant in and beyond their future classrooms.

As aspiring high school teachers, many of my students are incentivized to focus on and imagine the ways they will teach American history classes. My goal was to get them to think beyond this prospect and ask why European and colonial history matter. In other words, who cares about the Victorian world? How do people engage with, confront, and encounter unfamiliar histories in their own lives?

To try to answer these questions, I designed our engagement with nineteenth-century Europe around an investigation of public history. Public history is already and always about moving outside the strict bounds of history as an academic discipline and aims to bring wider and more diverse audiences into the work of historical analysis and historical knowledge creation. I hoped that this public-facing approach to the past could help my students to imagine ways that the history of the Victorian world matters to them and to their future students, and perhaps help them to contribute to the broader project of undisciplining Victorian studies.

Centering public history as a historian of Europe was perhaps an unconventional choice in a central Illinois town where a public history course on Abraham Lincoln or the American Civil War would have been easier to teach. Inside and outside of the academy, public history and local history often function synonymously; when we think of public history, we think of work happening in local history museums, at interpretive historical sites, and among communities of genealogists, local historians, and tour guides.1 Public history courses, including the ones my colleagues and I teach, often involve visits to nearby historic sites and museums, or they facilitate opportunities for engagement with archives that illuminate local history. How, then, might one teach public history in a European history course situated at a university in the American Midwest?

My questions about the relationship between public and local history have been shaped by my own experiences as a historian and by the institutions and funding models that shape the field of public history in the United States. As a historian of Victorian Britain and the British Empire who is situated in the U.S., I have long-assumed (perhaps both rightly and wrongly) that public history wasn’t for me. When I was applying to graduate school, it seemed that most programs in public history would necessitate a focus on American history topics, and I often struggled to find ways to frame my work as relevant to the people I knew and the students I taught.

During my own training in a history Ph.D. program, I saw many institutional grants go to supporting public history projects that were directly relevant to the local community. The same trends seemed to apply in the broader institutional landscape of the public-facing humanities. For instance, one of the major grants offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities is for public humanities projects that “address topics of regional or national relevance by drawing connections to broad themes or historical questions.” But is Victorian history of “regional or national relevance”? How might we think about public history as something decoupled from localized concerns? Can public audiences be made to care about history that they feel has nothing to do with their place or context?

Working to de-localize public history felt to me like a way of undisciplining it. Asking students to find ways to relate Victorian history to public audiences today resulted in an undisciplined approach to the nineteenth-century world. As we discussed which specific audiences needed to know about different aspects of the history we learned about in class, students came to see that the nineteenth century is, as Christina Sharpe argues, “a past that is not past” (13).

In addition to the textual primary and secondary sources that are the norm in history classes, we also considered a wide variety of public history projects together – from an augmented reality virtual tour of the 1851 Crystal Palace, to digital collections and public art installations related to the 1871 Paris Commune, to a database of information about the British government’s Slave Compensation Commission. Students discussed and debated the goals and efficacy of each project, and as they did, they came to see how Victorian history shaped and continues to shape systems of power, thought, and knowledge that we live with today. These discussions were pointed at preparing students for their end-of-semester assignment – they were each asked to develop, design, and pitch their own public history project on any topic related to nineteenth-century history.

By making the public the focus of this assignment and foregoing a traditional history essay, I hoped that students would be encouraged to take analytics such as race, class, gender, coloniality, and ability as starting points for engaging today’s audiences with the past. My goal was to encourage students to think about how to present the history of the nineteenth century in ways that could upend and challenge the power structures that defined the Victorian world. As Christopher Jones writes about a different unconventional assignment that he has employed in his history classroom, “[t]hinking beyond the confines of the traditional essay often results in [students] thinking beyond the confines of traditional subject material, too.”

Decoupling the public from the local, then, helped students to avoid simply replicating “the colonialist narrowness of the ‘Victorian,’” as Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong call us to do (375). Instead, they developed projects aimed at educating audiences today about the lasting effects of a fascinating and impressive range of Victorian power structures – from the racist ideologies of imperialism and enslavement, to the primacy of industrial capitalism, to nineteenth-century definitions of liberalism, gender, and whiteness. Students overwhelmingly developed projects that pitched public histories “from below,” according to the more expansive definition of this term by E. P. Thompson that scholars such as Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne employ in their work on global histories of protest and dissent.

Because my students, who were primarily in their second year of study, were at the beginning of their time as history and history education majors, the perspectives they brought to bear were in fact already undisciplined. Illinois State University is an R2 regional public university that draws most of its students from the Chicago suburbs and rural communities – 92% of our students are Illinois residents (“Illinois State University Fact Sheet” [PDF]).

To them, doing public-facing historical work didn’t mean engaging with prestigious institutions or funders, investigating local history, or touring urban centers. They saw value in public history right away. But, more than that, they saw value in a particular type of public history – an accessible, “homegrown” version that anyone could produce and access. Having an obvious connection to local history didn’t seem to matter to them. Rather, finding the right topic for the right audience did. Public history, they showed me, could be undisciplined too.

Instead of asking students to take on the work of producing a public history project in its entirety, I asked them to write a mini grant application (or pitch) for a public history project of their own design. This was for two reasons. First, issues of practicality shaped my assignment design. I wanted to emphasize the deliberate process of project development in this course, and it felt unreasonable to ask students to produce anything more than a pitch for a project in just a semester.

Second, and more importantly, I wanted to introduce students to the realities of how public history projects are funded, justified, and designed in the real world. Grant writing is rarely considered to be disciplinary writing. Even among historians who experiment by assigning various writing genres in their classrooms, grant writing is seldom a focus.2 I liked that the “pitch” assignment format gave students a chance to practice the technical (and marketable) skill of grant writing. Even more, it gave our class the opportunity to think about what it means to apply for, receive, or fund a grant that could support a public history project.

We looked at calls for proposals from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council to understand how these funding systems work, and I adapted calls from these and other institutions as I wrote the assignment description and requirements. This assignment, then, was designed to take students’ ideas seriously by asking them to engage in the same kind of thinking that museum, community, and organizing professionals do.

Students were responsible for a series of elements that make up a typical grant proposal. They chose a topic, developed an idea for a public history project (and were encouraged to choose any format for the project – from physical monuments to online collections, from podcasts to social media campaigns), investigated current scholarly thinking on the topic, and connected their pitch to a specific public audience that they argued needed to know about their chosen piece of nineteenth-century history. They also wrote a logistics statement and proposed a project budget.

While having students practice grant writing had practical benefits, I felt conflicted that the assignment encouraged students to write so formulaically and that it reinforced unequitable funding models in the public history field. Indeed, my assignment instructions for this project were more specific than the ones I usually write for my classes.

However, I felt that the rigidity of the assignment instructions made sense – students weren’t engaging in traditional disciplinary writing but were instead learning a new genre with its own conventions. Being transparent about what those were felt important to me as an issue of equity and as a way to make this assignment both practical and useful for students. At the same time, teaching students to write in such genre-specific ways can be stifling, and framing the assignment around a “pitch” for institutional funding felt like a reinforcement of disciplinary conventions.

To resist some of these tensions, I asked students to produce one “creative element” to accompany their project pitch. This could be a sample or mock-up of some aspect of their proposed project. I hoped this component would allow them to get outside of the bounds of grant writing while allowing them to engage creatively with their intellectual work. This piece of the assignment was inspired by historians who have experimented with “unessay” assignments in their classrooms.

Unessays are projects in which students are encouraged to rethink and reconceptualize the traditional history essay and instead produce final projects that transcend disciplinary thinking and constraints. In response to this prompt, faculty report receiving everything from board games to knitting projects to original songs (see, for example, Denial; Donawho; and Jones). My hope was that my students would be motivated to think creatively about their topics and ideas by being asked to do this unconventional piece of the assignment.

A successful submission, then, was one where the student thought carefully about how their topic, target audience, and public history project intersected. The most exciting submissions were ones where students took their own interests or identities as a starting point and designed a project that they were passionate about. For example, one student proposed building an interactive database of primary sources related to the poisonous effects that trendy arsenic green dye had on nineteenth-century consumers. This student was a fashion design major who was able to explore her own interests while making a case that the example of arsenic could be educational for citizens interested in consumer protections and corporate regulation today. In addition to writing her grant proposal pitch, she assembled a mood board – a genre borrowed from her design courses – for her project that drew on her expertise and training in design (see Image 1, below).

Image 1. Taylor Soja. “Creative Element Produced by a Student for Their Project Titled ‘Scheele’s Green: The Color to Dye For.’” 2024. Published by permission. View Image 1 (open in new tab; click on image to enlarge).

Another student reimagined the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the wax museum to recover the voices of three prominent African and African diasporic women – Mary Seacole, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, and Sarah Baartman – whose lives were shaped by European colonial networks of power, migration, and movement. This student pitched an online, interactive “wax museum” designed to restore the voices of these historical figures by using evidence drawn from primary and secondary sources.

The juxtaposition of the uniquely nineteenth-century form of the wax museum with the restorative goals of her project made this student’s work inherently undisciplined – she drew on research and methodologies from history, gender and women’s studies, art history, theater, and performance to frame a project that would both be accessible to modern audiences and challenge them to learn about the world in a way that would have been familiar to people living in the Victorian world (see Images 2-3, below).

Images 2-3. Taylor Soja. “Creative Element Produced by a Student for Their Project Titled ‘Poor Creatures: Three Case Studies of Black Women in Nineteenth Century Europe.’” 2024. Published by permission. View Image 2 (opens in new tab; click on image to enlarge) and Image 3 (opens in new tab; click on image to enlarge).

Although each student produced their own individual project, they collaborated with each other throughout the semester in a series of scaffolded assignments. Each week in class we discussed model public history projects, so students had examples to draw on as they thought about and researched possible topics and formats for their projects. Each student proposed a topic in week 8 of our 16-week semester and received detailed feedback from me and their peers.

Over the next several weeks, I devoted class time to helping them build the skills they would need to complete a draft of their pitch. For example, I held a research workshop where we practiced locating and analyzing scholarly resources about their topics. It was at this point in the semester that we began to discuss grant funding and grant writing in detail and worked to understand the utility of learning this genre of writing. Students then participated in peer review to workshop a draft of their final pitch in week 15.

During their peer review sessions, I paired students working on similar topics and asked them to discuss and evaluate their work together – I have included the workshop guidelines in the attached assignment. Finally, each student presented their work to the class during the final week of the semester, and we held an anonymous vote to decide which of their peer’s projects the class would fund. In grading their projects, I took their own assessment of their rough drafts into account and evaluated the progress made in each scaffolded step to provide holistic feedback on the entire process rather than only on the final product.

My hope is to continue teaching and adapting this assignment in future iterations of the course, increasing the emphasis on collaboration and peer review among students. While I plan to continue asking each student to develop their own project, I would like to experiment with ways to encourage them to develop their ideas with each other and perhaps even with their target audiences. Although we are limited by time and resources, it might be interesting to add an element where students interview or otherwise engage with members of the community they are hoping to reach.

For instance, one student pitched a project designed to educate politicians and activists on the history of the Paris Commune as a model for localized political activism. He pitched a seminar-style event modeled on trainings he had attended while interning for a local political campaign. Perhaps he could have collaborated with local political groups to design his training or solicited feedback on the kind of event they would be most interested in attending. Another idea is to move up the timeline of the entire scaffolded project and host an open house where students pitch their projects to audiences outside of our course.

As a historian of the nineteenth century, finding ways to make Victorian history relevant to contemporary audiences feels like an urgent project because it is one often met with indifference by public audiences and even, sometimes, by other historians. My students showed me that framing public history differently may be the key to achieving this goal. By moving beyond the bounds that insulate the academy and prioritizing those histories that we continue to live with, it seems to me that the perspectives of our students might be the key to undisciplining Victorian studies.

1. Public history textbooks often reflect this. See, for example, Cherstin M. Lyon, Elizabeth M. Nix, and Rebecca K. Shrum, Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past, Engaging Audiences.  Back to text
2. For example, in “Reimagining Writing in History Courses,” Kelly King-O’Brien, Gordon Mantler, Nan Mullenneaux, and Kristen Neuschel describe a range of innovative writing assignments, such as asking students to produce newspaper editorials, annotated editions of primary source, and creative pieces, but do not include a grant-writing assignment.  Back to text

Works Cited

Burton, Antoinette, and Tony Ballantyne, editors. World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, et al. “Introduction: Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies, vol. 62, no. 3, Spring 2020, pp. 369–91.

Denial, Catherine. “The Unessay.” Cat Denial, 26 Apr. 2019.

Donawho, Nicole. “The (My) Unessay.” The Dual Professor, 15 Jan. 2021.

Jones, Christopher. “Assigning the Unessay in the U.S. Survey.” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, 26 June 2018.

King-O’Brien, Kelly, et al. “Reimagining Writing in History Courses.” The Journal of American History, vol. 107, no. 4, 2021, pp. 942–54.

Lyon, Cherstin M., et al. Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past, Engaging Audiences. 1st ed., Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017.

“Public Humanities Projects.” National Endowment for the Humanities, 2024.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Pantheon Books, 1964.

Beyond the Essay Series

This cluster challenges instructors to think beyond the traditional essay often used in Victorian studies classrooms by providing examples of multimodal and/or public-facing assignments. Through creative assignment design, this cluster demonstrates that students can participate in the undisciplining of the field via projects that encourage critical and multimodal remaking, engagement, and communication, as well as those that reimagine and expand the audience of Victorian studies.

Developer Biography

Taylor Soja is an assistant professor of History at Illinois State University, where she studies the history of colonial war in the British empire to 1918. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, and her work has appeared in Gender & History, among other venues. Her first book, under contract with Manchester University Press, is titled Little Wars of Empire: British Veterans in a Colonial World, 1885-1918.