Mark Tebeau
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Phone: 480-965-8595
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975 S. Myrtle Ave. PO Box 874302 Room 4502--SHPRS--Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-4302
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Mail code: 4302Campus: Tempe
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An urban, public, and digital historian, Mark Tebeau has directed more than two dozen digital humanities, oral history, and public history projects. Along with co-editors Serge Noiret and Gerben Zaagsma, he recently authored A Handbook of Digital Public History (De Gruyter Oldenbourg.) In Fall 2022, Tebeau served as the first "Public Historian in Residence" at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg.
In March 2020, Tebeau founded and co-directed A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19, a crowdsourced digital archive documenting the pandemic. With attention to silences evident in traditional archives, JOTPY has curated the event dynamically, connecting and linking data drawn from around the United States and the world into an archive that offers a window into this critical historical moment.
Tebeau leads the development of Curatescape a framework for mobile publishing that seeks to make open-source and/or low-cost hosted mobile tools available to scholars and curators. With funding from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, Curatescape is being used by more than 100 cultural organizations, universities, and heritage preservation organizations to curate landscapes and museums.
Before joining the faculty of Arizona State University in 2013, Tebeau founded and directed the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. Tebeau and the center collected hundreds of oral histories that explore the history of the Northeast Ohio region, available to the public through Cleveland Voices.
As an urban historian, Tebeau’s first book, "Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800-1950" (Johns Hopkins, 2003), examined how urban residents physically and metaphorically constructed American cities in response to fire risk. He recently wrote about the Los Angeles fires for Bloomberg International. He is now completing a book that explores the history of public gardens, monuments, and public art through the lens of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens.
He can be found on twitter @urbanhumanist.
- Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University
- M.A. Carnegie Mellon University
- A.B. University of Chicago
Tebeau's research explores the changing historical construction of cities, landscapes, and place. In particular, his work has focused on how gardens, urban monuments, and memory landscapes have been imagined in the United States and across the globe. As a public historian and digital humanists, Tebeau argues that scholars have become curators and that urbanists should reimagine the field to curate cities as living museums.
As an urban historian, Tebeau has explored how the danger of fire shaped cities from the 18th century into the 21st century. Eating Smoke contrasts how firefighters confronted fire danger through physical labor and a cult of heroism with fire underwriters transformation of fire hazard into abstract risks calculated and commodified on statistical ledgers. Eating Smoke shows how the modern city became less subject to sweeping center city fires, even as the particular risks of fire shifted toward the suburbs and beyond.
Tebeau's current research explores how diverse American communities created monumental conversations in cities, parks, and gardens across the United States. Using the Cleveland Cultural Gardens as a lens, Tebeau seeks to show that monuments took on lives that traversed national boundaries, creating global conversations about identity and culture. At the same time, local communities and neighborhoods deployed and redeployed
As a public historian, Tebeau has held fellowships and curated exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution, Mercer Museum-Bucks County Historical Society, and the Missouri Historical Society. Prior to beginning entering the professoriate, he held curatorial positions at the Cleveland History Center (Western Reserve Historical Society.) With over two decades of museum and community history experience, Tebeau's work has included developing exhibits, public programs, and educational activities, including walking tours to digital collecting projects, and interpretative projects with public arts agencies.
As a digital historian, Tebeau developed the place-based mobile application Cleveland Historical, which became the prototype for Curatescape, a framework for mobile curation that allows scholars, museums, and main street preservation advocacy groups to curate landscapes as living museums. He presently works with Arizona State University students to interpret the history of the greater Phoenix region through Salt River Stories.
As an oral historian Tebeau has both collected oral histories and developed digital tools for evaluating oral histories, including SocialScribe. Tebeau received oral history training at the Rural Folklife Center at Kenyon College under the direction of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center. Building on his work documenting industrial workers in Cleveland and then the history of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, in partnership with Cleveland NPR affiliate WCPN, Tebeau initiated and developed the Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection, now a digital archive with more than 1200 interviews at Cleveland State University, which is also available through the Cleveland Voices Podcast.
Understanding how senses of place and space can be expressed, understood, and imagined in collaboration with public audiences remains a vexing problem for urban (and rural) communities across the globe. Storytelling and community building around history remain powerful tools in connecting individuals to one another and their environments. More critically, engaging publics in this process, training them to be stewards of place and storytellers, stands at the heart of both rebuilding civil society and creating a more vibrant, diverse, and tolerant citizenry.
- Mark Tebeau, “Eating Smoke”: Fire in Urban America, 1800-1950 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; paperback 2012);
- Mark Tebeau, Editor, The Social Fabric (New York: Pearson/Longman Publishing, 11th ed., 2009);
- Mark Tebeau, Serge Noiret, Gerben Zaagsma, editors, The Handbook of Digital Public History (Berlin: DeGruyter; 2022);
- “Curation,” in Mark Tebeau, Serge Noiret, Gerben Zaagsma, editors, The Handbook of Digital Public History (Berlin: DeGruyter; 2023).
- “Arizona Monuments & Memory,” Journal of Arizona History Volume 62, No. 2, (Summer 2021), 131-140; editor of this special issue of the Journal.
- Tebeau, Mark. “Rapid-Response Archiving Meets the Pandemic.” Collections: A Journal for Museum & Archives Professionals 17, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 199–206.
- “Apples to Oranges? The American Monumental Landscape,” International Public History Journal Volume 1, Number 2 (Winter 2018), 1 – 7.
- “Engaging the Materiality of the Archive in the Digital Age,” for Collections: A Journal for Museum & Archives Professionals, volume 12, number 4, Fall 2016 (475-485);
- “Listening to the City: Oral History & Place in the Digital Era,” Oral History Review (Winter-Spring 2013); 40 (1): 25-35;
- “Curating the City,” inMediaRes, (May 25, 2012);
- “Sculpted Gardens and Terraced Landscapes: Art & Place in Cleveland’s Cultural Gardens, 1916-2006” Journal of Social History, Volume 44 Number 2 (Winter 2010), 327-349;
- Mark Tebeau, “Pursuing E-Opportunities in the History Classroom,” The Journal of American History Vol. 89, No. 4 (March 2003), 1489-1494;
- Mark Tebeau, “Scaling the Heights: Heroic Firemen, Gender, and the Urban Environment, 1875-1900,” in Virginia Scharff, ed., Seeing Nature through Gender (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 2003).
- Principal Investigator, Journal of the Plague Year: Recording Arizonans Experiences with the Covid-19 Pandemic, Arizona Humanities December 1, 2020 - November 30, 2021.
- Scientific Advisor, Increasing Learning and Efficacy about Emerging Technologies through Transmedia Engagement by the Public in Science-in-Society Activities (the Frankenstein Centennial); Ed Finn Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation, $2.3M, 2015-2021;
- Co-Investigator (Paul Hirt, Principal Investigator), “Glen Canyon Dam, Adaptive Management Program,” Bureau of Land Management, Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Study Unit, $250,000, 2016-2021;
- Tebeau,Mark Thomas*, Ferguson,Cody Eugene. Digital Interpretation of Arizona Falls. SRP-SALT RIVER PROJECT(3/17/2014 - 6/30/2014).
- Reyes,Angelita*, Reyes,Angelita*, Barton,Craig Evan, Gilfillan,Daniel, Sadowski-Smith,Claudia, Tebeau,Mark Thomas. CHIF: Interdisciplinary High-Impact Place Studies Project : Patrick Robert Parker Sydnor Historic Site Mecklenburg County VA (ASUF 30005923). ASU FDN(1/1/2014 - 12/31/2015).
- Principal Investigator, SocialScribe/Oral History Toolkit, Carnegie Foundation, President’s Initiative, Arizona State University, $150,000, 2014-2018;
- Co-Investigator, (Paul Hirt, PI) Nature History and Culture at the Nations Edge, Arizona Humanities March 3, 2014 - 2015. [Originating Sponsor: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)]
- Project Advisor, Curating Kisumu: Adapting Mobile Humanities Interpretation in East Africa, see MaCleKi: $59,301, Souther/Owino PIs, (2014-2016);
- Principal Investigator, Mobile Museums Initiative, National Endowment for the Humanities, $59,722, 2013-2014;
- Mobile Historical, National Endowment for the Humanities, $49,850; 2011-13;
- U.S. Department of Education, Teaching American History Program, $996,000 award, PI, Constructing, Consuming, Conserving America, 2008-2012;
- Civil War 150, Ohio Historical Society, $12,000, 2009-11;
- U.S. Department of Education, Teaching American History Program, $1,994,000 award, PI, The Sounds of American History, 2006-2010;
- U.S. Department of Education, Teaching American History Program, $986,000 award, PI, Teaching American History through the Regional Landscape, 2003-2006;
Courses
2025 Summer
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
2025 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 591 | Seminar |
| HST 593 | Applied Project |
| WWS 569 | Memory and Monuments |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
2024 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
| HST 585 | Professional Experience |
2024 Summer
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
2024 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 485 | History in the Wild |
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
| HST 593 | Applied Project |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
2023 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 591 | Seminar |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 492 | Honors Directed Study |
| WWS 569 | Memory and Monuments |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
2023 Summer
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
2023 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
| HST 591 | Seminar |
2022 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
| WWS 569 | Memory and Monuments |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
2022 Summer
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
2022 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 682 | Advcd Rsrch Skill |
2021 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 485 | History in the Wild |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
2021 Summer
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| WWS 563 | The Lived Experience of WWII |
| WWS 563 | The Lived Experience of WWII |
| WWS 563 | The Lived Experience of WWII |
2021 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 682 | Advcd Rsrch Skill |
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
| WWS 569 | Memory and Monuments |
2020 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 306 | Studies in US History |
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
| HST 494 | Special Topics |
2020 Summer
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 591 | Seminar |
| WWS 563 | The Lived Experience of WWII |
| WWS 563 | The Lived Experience of WWII |
| WWS 563 | The Lived Experience of WWII |
2020 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 502 | Public History Methodology |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 580 | Practicum |
| HST 306 | Studies in US History |
| HST 792 | Research |
| HST 799 | Dissertation |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| HST 682 | Advcd Rsrch Skill |
(DRAFT of Selected, after 2013)
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Collecting Globally, Curating Locally.” Information and Archival Science Research Institute Seminars. November 10, 2024.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Curatorial Practice and the Global Turn in Digital Public History.” Korean Public History Association. May 31, 2024.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Best Practices for Creating Sustainable Public History Class Projects.” Annual Meeting of the National Council on Public History. April 10, 2024.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Collecting and Reflecting in Times of Crisis.” "TO BE DETERMINED." National Council on Public History. April 12, 2023.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Imagining Digital History & Public Humanities.” Indianapolis University Arts & Humanities Institute. February 16, 2023.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Curation, Community, & Crowds: Archiving the Pandemic.” November 8, 2022.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Curation in Digital Public History.” October 10, 2022.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Curation in Public History and Digital Humanities.” October 20, 2022.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Curating Landscape: Monuments and World War II Memory.” October 25, 2022.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Crowdsourcing Curation: Metadata & Silence in Pandemic Archives.” October 26, 2022.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Covid-19 and Public History: A Critical Take on the Silences of Web Archives and the Silencing of Covid-19 Experiences.” International Standing Conference for the History of Education. August 30–September 2, 2022.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Working Group: Revisiting Shared Authority in the Age of Digital Public History.” International Federation for Public History. August 15–21, 2022.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Convening, Humanities Action Lab, Climates of Inequality.” October 30, 2019.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Curatescape Unconference.” Brown University, October 1, 2018.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Brown’s Ranch Landscape Survey.” Arizona Historic Preservation Conference. June 1, 2018.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Re-Imaging Landscape as Soundscape: Digital Curation.” June 1, 2017.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Listening to the Preserve.” McDowell Sonoran Conservancy Lecture Series. April 1, 2017.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Digital Oral History: Considering the Contributions of Michael Frisch.” October 1, 2016.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Digital Representations of Genocide.” ASU Comparative Genocide Symposium. October 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Mobile Tour Developmen.” The New Tour Conference. September 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Working Group: Public History as Digital History.” April 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “That Camp.” April 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Mobile Tours & Public Engagement.” Think Outside the Building: Public History and the Media Conference. February 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Workshop: Digital Public History.” January 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Materials of Loss.” Symposium on Bureaucracy and the Organization of Knowledge, University of North Texas Conference. April 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Public History in the Digital Age.” ASU Leadership Society Keynote. March 1, 2015.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Strategies and Techniques for Mobile Interpretation for Landscapes & Museums.” November 1, 2014.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Garden Stories: Developing Digital Interpretations for the Community of Gardens.” Workshop. August 1, 2014.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Imagining the Deindustrial City through Post-Industrial Digital Tools.” Deindustrialization & Its Aftermaths. May 1, 2014.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Ephemerality & Performance in Public History.” April 1, 2014.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Imagining Place in the Digital Age.” June 1, 2013.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Re-Imagining Curation in the Digital Age.” Minnesota Digital Humanities Conference. May 1, 2013.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Mobile Tools for Public Historians.” April 1, 2013.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Digital Curation.” OhioLink NEH Workshop. February 1, 2013.
- Tebeau, Mark Thomas. “Curating New Orleans: Storytelling in the Mobile Age.” January 1, 2013.
As a digital historian, Tebeau developed the place-based mobile application Cleveland Historical, which became the prototype for Curatescape, a framework for mobile curation that allows scholars, museums, and main street preservation advocacy groups to curate landscapes as living museums. He presently works with Arizona State University students to interpret the history of the greater Phoenix region through Salt River Stories. Curatescape seeks to make open-source and/or low-cost hosted mobile tools available to scholars and curators. With funding from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, Curatescape is being used by more than 150 cultural organizations, universities, and heritage preservation organizations to curate landscapes and museums. Curatescape is available on Github: https://github.com/CPHDH/Curatescape. Curatescape-powered projects have received over $400k in grant funding; see the National Humanities Center Report or search the NEH database for more information. Projects include Salt River Stories, Cleveland Historical, Spokane Historical, Baltimore Heritage, New Orleans Historical, Explore Kentucky, and Connecticut Communities.
In March 2020, Tebeau co-created and co-directs A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19, an international curatorial consortium that has built a crowdsourced digital archive documenting the pandemic. With attention to silences evident in traditional archives, JOTPY has connected and linked data drawn from around the United States and the world into an archive that will help present and future researchers understand this tenuous moment. Journal of a Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 has more than 20K digital objects, making it arguably the largest born-digital rapid-response archive of the pandemic in the world.
As an oral historian, Tebeau has both collected oral histories and developed digital tools for evaluating oral histories, including SocialScribe. Tebeau received oral history training at the Rural Folklife Center at Kenyon College under the direction of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center. Building on his work documenting industrial workers in Cleveland and then the history of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, in partnership with Cleveland NPR affiliate WCPN, Tebeau initiated and developed the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project, now a digital archive with hundreds of interviews at Cleveland State University. As Tebeau left Cleveland, the project team introduced Cleveland Voices, a website that features project oral histories. The team at CSU's Center for Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (which Tebeau founded) continues this work of collecting and archiving oral histories, as well as managing Curatescape.