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Professorship for Public History


What is public history?

Public history is a subdiscipline of history which deals with the multitude of forms, formats and practices within which history appears in public. Public history uses a wide variety of representations of the past as sources, whether they are material or visual, in the media, digital or virtual, or performative. Research in public history takes an interdisciplinary approach to deal with the complex conditions under which these narratives and representations relating to the past develop. It asks how history is "made" but also how it is changed and received. Public history transcends the analysis of current representations and is not bound to contemporary history: its analysis is just as informative when dealing with distant eras.

Public history thrives on interfaces and intersections. At its heart, it is an interdisciplinary undertaking offering a multitude of points of contact with other subjects from European ethnology to the didactics of history and the related field of heritage and memory studies. Lying at the junction of theory and practice, it involves cooperation with actors from differing fields of historical culture. 

To sustain the development of junctions between theory and practice the professorship works closely with the Center for Commemorative Culture at University Regensburg.


  1. Fakultät für Philosophie, Kunst-, Geschichts- und Gesellschaftswissenschaften
  2. Institut für Geschichte

Professorship for Public History


Universität Regensburg
Sedanstraße 1, SE02
93055 Regensburg
Telefon 0941 943 7682

juliane.tomann@ur.de