Explore some of the innovative public history projects Julie has led.

History Now: The Pandemic Diaries Project

From August 2020 to July 2021, NYPL's Pandemic Diaries project, conceived and directed by Julie, invited people to submit audio recordings of themselves or their loved ones telling personal stories about life amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The project collected over 280 submissions to be archived in NYPL’s Research Collections. Once they are preserved and described, the audio diaries will be made available to researchers via NYPL's Digital Collections.

Doc Chat

Julie designed and directs Doc Chat, a weekly program series from the Center for Research in the Humanities at the New York Public Library that launched in July 2020. Each 30-minute episode of Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to analyze the most interesting and evocative primary sources from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. Explore past episodes on the Doc Chat Channel of the NYPL Blog and register for upcoming episodes on the Library’s events calendar.

Watch the first episode of Doc Chat below.

Flatbush + Main

In April 2016, Julie launched Flatbush + Main, a podcast from Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS), with co-host and co-producer Zaheer Ali, to dig into some of the most compelling stories that they encounter in their work as historians at BHS. In each of the podcast's 36 episodes, Julie and Zaheer spoke to historians and activists, explored primary sources at BHS's archives and beyond, listened to and analyzed oral histories, and endorsed some of BHS's terrific exhibitions and public programs.

Flatbush + Main episodes tackled salient topics like the history of waste, the past and future of Brooklyn's waterfront, the borough's Queer spaces, and more. Popular across wide audiences, the podcast won a 2018 MUSE award from the American Alliance of Museums. Listen to all Flatbush + Main episodes and explore show notes here.

Taking Care of Brooklyn

Julie was historian and curator of Taking Care of Brooklyn: Stories of Sickness and Health, a multi-year exhibition and public history project that opened at Brooklyn Historical Society in May 2019. The groundbreaking exhibition explores how centuries of Brooklynites have understood sickness and health, weaving the history of Brooklyn through the experiences of everyday Brooklynites giving, receiving, demanding, and being denied health care.

Waterfront

Julie was the historian and curator of Waterfront, an exhibition and multimedia experience brings to life the vibrant history of Brooklyn’s coastline through stories of workers, artists, industries, activists, families, neighborhoods, and ecosystems for visitors of all ages. Waterfront was on display at Brooklyn Historical Society's historic DUMBO location from January 2018 until its closing in October 2020.

Read a review of Waterfront from the AAM journal Exhibition, and explore the exhibition in the video below:

Brooklyn Historical Society Map Portal

Julie co-directed a major NEH-funded project that allowed BHS to digitize over 1,500 historical maps, enhance catalog records, and build an innovative online map portal. The portal geolocates each historic map on a present-day one and offers faceted searching and high resolution zoom functionality. BHS worked with developers to create two WordPress plugins that allowed metadata and assets stored in the Library's PastPerfect database to be accessed and presented on the portal's WordPress platform. The plug-ins are publicly available on BHS's GitHub site.

Personal Correspondents: Photography and Letter Writing in Civil War Brooklyn

Between 1861 and 1865, over 30,000 men departed Brooklyn to fight in the American Civil War. They left behind spouses, sweethearts, parents, children, siblings, and friends. Personal Correspondents, an exhibition conceived, researched, and curated by Julie, examined how these Brooklynites remembered and communicated with each other, and how they chronicled the war on the homefront and the battlefield. Featuring evocative letters and photographs from Brooklyn Historical Society's collection, the exhibition brought to life Brooklynites' everyday experiences during one of the nation's most transformative eras, and drew connections between soldiers’ experiences in the 19th century and today. Read Holland Cotter’s review of Personal Correspondents in the New York Times.

TeachArchives.org

Julie founded and co-edited TeachArchives.org, a robust educational resource that lays out a pioneering approach to teaching document analysis to students in the archives, with Robin Katz. The site features an innovative teaching philosophy, classroom-tested sample exercises, best practices for crafting in-archives student exercises or designing similar programs, and extensive documentation of Students and Faculty in the Archives, the three-year project that led to this website.

Brooklyn Waterfront History

In collaboration with Brooklyn Bridge Park, Julie oversaw development of an interactive, place-based website that brings to life the layered history of Brooklyn's waterfront. The site launched in April 2014.

An American Family Grows in Brooklyn: The Lefferts Family Papers

This digital exhibition tells the story of early Brooklyn through the lens of one family's archives.