Jennifer L. Koslow
Jennifer Koslow is a scholar of Public Health, Public History, and Gender. She directs the department’s Historical Administration and Public History program, which facilitates skills in collecting, preserving, and interpreting history with and for public audiences.
Prof. Koslow’s most recent books are Exhibiting Health: Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Public History: An Introduction From Theory to Application (Wiley: 2021). She is also the author of Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform (New Brunswick, N.J.: University of Rutgers Press, 2009).
As a Public Historian, Koslow has worked on several consequential scholarly products of historical research that foster community engagement. These include a historical narrative for a Historic American Landscapes Survey of Smokey Hollow (National Park Service Program), a historical narrative for a National Register of Historic Places Nomination (National Park Service Program), and other Civil Rights commemorations in Tallahassee, including the Tallahassee-Leon County Civil Rights Heritage Walk.
Before taking a position at FSU, she worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL to facilitate the use of its collections through exhibits, teacher programs, and scholarly works-in-progress seminars.
Her research has been supported by the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health, the American Historical Society, The Rockefeller Archive Center, the Huntington library, the Historical Society of Southern California, and the New Jersey Historical Society.
Research Interests
Books
Public History: An Introduction from Theory to Application
Public History: An Introduction from Theory to Application is the first text of its kind to offer both historical background on the ways in which historians have collected, preserved, and interpreted history with and for public audiences in the United States since the nineteenth century to the present and instruction on current practices of public history.
Exhibiting Health: Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era
In the early twentieth century, public health reformers approached the task of ameliorating unsanitary conditions and preventing epidemic diseases with optimism.
Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform
At the dawn of the Progressive Era, when America was experiencing an industrial boom, many working families often ate contaminated food, lived in decaying urban tenements, and had little access to medical care.