Martha Norkunas
Martha
Norkunas holds a Ph.D. in Folklore
from Indiana University's Folklore
Institute. She is the author of The
Politics of Public Memory: Tourism,
History and Ethnicity in Monterey,
California (SUNY Press, 1993), which
won the 1994 Historic Preservation
Book, and Monuments and Memory: History
and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts
(Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002/
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
2006) which was awarded Honorable
Mention from the Women's Section
of the American Folklore Society
in 2003. She is the recipient of
a postdoctoral fellowship from the
American Council of Learned Societies,
grants from the Theodore Edson Parker
Foundation, The National Trust for
Historic Preservation, the L.J. and
Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, the Massachusetts
Foundation for the Humanities,
the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson
Innovation Award from the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship Foundation,
the Summerlee Foundation and the
Houston Endowment.
From 1988-89 she was the Gardner scholar-in-residence for the Shifting Gears project in Massachusetts, documenting how the meaning of work changed from 1920-1980. For five years served as the Cultural Affairs Director at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission where she oversaw a wide range of cultural initiatives to interpret labor and ethnicity in the industrial city. She has worked with museums, historic sites, and public humanities projects on issues of on memory, gender, and the representation of minority voices. She has also been involved in oral history projects on industrial and labor history, immigration, racial identity, and gender. She is on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, teaching interdisciplinary teams of graduate students to think critically about memory and history, and to apply their knowledge to social and cultural issues.
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