Public history

Welcome to visiting research fellow Rebecca S. Wingo

Rebecca S. Wingo
Public Historian Rebecca S. Wingo joined the C²DH as a visiting researcher for the upcoming weeks.

Rebecca S. Wingo is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of Public History at the University of Cincinnati.

Prof. Wingo is a settler-scholar of the Indigenous and American West. Broadly (and rather eclectically), she studies houses: homesteads in the West, houses replacing tipis on the Crow Reservation in Montana, and the use of eminent domain to displace Black citizens for highway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. How Americans define house and home is a reflection of architectural determinism — the belief that the structure of the house can shape the behaviors of the residents within, or that houses can be weaponized to destroy unwanted communities or cultures.

Wingo is exploring sustainability plans for community-based digital public history projects. One of the best models for developing a data management plan is the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap (STSR), but the model assumes that a project will remain tethered to an academic institution. Remembering Rondo, Wingo’s test case, is a community-owned and operated digital project. Wingo will follow the STRS to develop a sustainability plan and identify weak points in what she is describing as “sustainable shared authority.”

In 2018, Prof. Wingo’s co-authored book, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History received the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction from the Nebraska Center for the Book and the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for Nonfiction Award from the Association of College & Research Libraries. Her co-edited volume Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy received the 2021 Book Award from the National Council on Public History. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Taft Research Center, the Center for Great Plains Studies, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.