Introducing Marisa S. Budlong and the Insurrect! Public History Fellowship

This summer, Insurrect! is excited to work with Marisa S. Budlong as a public history fellow. We are able to support Marisa’s work on the project thanks to a generous and thoughtful donation from American Literature Professor Jonathan Beecher Field. If you’d like to join Prof JBF in donating to Insurrect!, check out our support page. If you are a graduate student or early career scholar interested in learning more on how to write for a public audience, mark your calendars for our upcoming Zoom panel, “Writing History for the Public,” on Wednesday August 5th at 5 pm EST.

Hello Insurrect! readers! My name is Marisa S. Budlong (she/her), and I am excited to share that I will be interning with Insurrect! this summer.

I am a Master’s student in the History department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where I study the history of the United States, gender and sexuality history, and public history. My public history work focuses on history communication, digital history, and writing history for the public. I became interested in public history as a way to historically ground our current politics. Due to losing my research assistant job in 2020 because of the pandemic, I had ample time to consider my (and our collective) future. During this time, I followed the work of public historians, particularly those who were connecting the past to the present and in particular the historical legacies of the pandemic, the George Floyd uprisings, and the presidential election in the United States. I learned from these experiences that public history can be a path toward being informed about our current political moment.

My involvement in labor and sexual violence prevention organizing and education also contributes to the political lens through which I view public history. These experiences solidified for me the ways in which the choices we make when communicating are inherently political. For historians, this means that what we highlight and which subjects we focus on are also political choices. I am excited to work with Insurrect! because I align with the way Insurrect! connects the political with the historical as well as their focus to create an online publication specifically for early career scholars. I am also looking forward to being in community with Insurrect! scholars who share my political commitments and motivations.

This summer I will be working with Insurrect! on the editorial process, including submissions, acquisitions, and style editing as well as learning about grassroots fundraising and the process of becoming a non-profit. In addition, I will co-create and co-facilitate our public panel initiative, Writing History for the Public. 

Before graduate school, I enjoyed reading outside on a nice day, bullet-journaling, and experimenting with baking. Now, I proudly spend my free time reading gossip on Twitter.