Kathleen Franz

Assistant Professor and Director of Public History

 Dr. Kathleen Franz is an Assistant Professor and Director of Public History at American University in Washington, DC. She served as curator for the National Building Museum's exhibition On Track: Transportation and the American City (2000) which examined the social and spatial history of urban transportation. She has provided research and curatorial support to various cultural institutions including the National Museum of American History, the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, and the Long Island Museum. Dr. Franz is a cultural historian with specialties in 20th Century America, the history of technology, and visual culture and museum studies. She has taught courses in public history, museum management and interpretation, visual and material culture and, until recently, she served as director of the graduate program in museum studies and historic preservation at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As an academic historian, she has received numerous fellowships including the Brook Hindle Prize for her work on the history of amateur invention. She is the author of Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2005.

As an historian of technology, Dr. Franz has long had an interest in the way things work and how images communicate ideas about engineering, architecture, and design. As a public historian, she is fascinated by David Macaulay's ability to make the history of large-scale constructions accessible to a wide audience. Her interest in Macaulay's work began in a graduate course on industrial archeology and has grown into a passion to better understand and interpret his drawing process within the realm of visual culture studies.

Dr. Franz earned her M.A. in American Civilization and Museum Studies and Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University.