My career as a writer and creator gave me the skills needed in museums large and small.
| Content career | Museum relevance |
|---|---|
| Technical writing for engineers | Precise, detail-oriented writing that walks a reader through complex material, coordinating across large numbers of stakeholders. |
| E-commerce copywriting for national & multinational clients | Making abstract ideas personally relevant, navigating the legal sensitivities of big brands, managing digital content, and building reusable template systems to speed production. |
| Leading 50+ subject matter experts to produce content | Project management, sharing niche information from subject matter experts in engaging ways, using a wide variety of self-publishing platforms. |
| Search-data-driven content strategy | Treating user experience as the real test of a product, and building interconnected content that reaches general audiences from several directions. |
The social-network graph and flow diagram above are two of the interactives I built for Speaking Through the Dead. I learned to build sites and visualizations like these as a content creator, long before I called it public history.
✕ Close
Sixteen years of professional writing taught me to know who's reading and write straight to them: five-hundred-page technical manuals for engineers, candy ads for brands like Starburst, content-marketing blogs. Each needed a different voice.
In 2019, I started Unlikely Explanations to bring those skills to my real passion: history. I found original stories and followed them—pieces like "Why Did Steamboat Springs Blow Up The Steamboat Spring?," which used railroad history to explore differing Ute and white-settler attitudes toward the land itself, and "How Do We Cope With Gender?," which traced eunuchs, proto-trans figures, and third genders across history. Publishing these stories taught me about the fraught transmission and reception of history firsthand.
Through the interviews I did for those stories—including one with Dr. Michael Barkun about his book A Culture of Conspiracy—I kept running into the same idea: that history can act as a kind of inoculation against radicalization and bigotry by creating spaces for exploring complexity, away from the false certainty of political broadcasting. As I have learned about education through my MA, my respect for informal learning and adult education has only grown.
Built to Protect and Speaking Through the Dead, on the Exhibits page, bring my writing career together with my new Museum Studies skills. I think people learn best when they explore and reach their own conclusions. I built these kinds of experiences for brands to drive web visitors to a point of purchase. Now, I can apply the same skills to the more noble pursuit of education.