For 2016, we are delighted to announce “Doing History: A Podcast Series about How Historians Work,” a monthly feature on Liz Covart’s Ben Franklin’s World. Over the next twelve months, Liz will interview scholars about how we frame historical problems, research in different kinds of archives, analyze primary materials including text, objects, and images, synthesize and critically engage secondary literature, present our work for collaborative feedback, and work with editors and publishers. She’ll be looking at what it means to present historical work in different contexts, including as teaching material, as published text, and in a public history context. She’ll be asking questions about different approaches to understanding the past, including the literary and the genealogical.

You can stream individual episodes of Doing History on your computer or download the entire series, including weekly episodes of Ben Franklin’s World, via the iTunes store or your favorite podcast provider.

Liz has made Ben Franklin’s World into an important platform for discussing scholarship with historians; past episodes have featured scholars such as Joyce Chaplin, Kathleen DuVal, Eric Foner, and Alan Taylor. Liz will be the 2016 Omohundro Institute-Lapidus Initiative Assistant Editor for New Media, and she will join, on an ongoing basis, the Advisory Group for the Lapidus Initiative.

Supporting this series helps to meet one of the chief aims of the Lapidus Initiative: to make more transparent the intensive and collaborative processes of developing and producing high-quality scholarship. It also offers us a new and exciting opportunity for public outreach. We are incredibly impressed with the work Liz has been doing and for the opportunity to continue to learn from and with her.