Faculty Spotlight
Daniel Greene
Northwestern History Professor and President of the Newberry Library
Daniel Greene has been telling stories about the past to expansive audiences for many years. Over the past two decades he has worked in a variety of positions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. and the Newberry Library in Chicago. At the Newberry, Greene curated an exhibit about wartime visual culture in the North during the Civil War, and at the USHMM he led a team that created a major exhibition about how Americans responded to Nazism before and during World War II. Greene is also the author of the award-winning book The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity, and he has taught at Northwestern as an adjunct professor of history for nearly a decade. It makes perfect sense, then, that in 2019 the Newberry selected him as its next president and librarian. Greene now oversees one of the most prominent research institutions in the nation, a library that houses 1.6 million books, miles of manuscripts, and hundreds of thousands of maps and hosts lectures, exhibitions, and seminars as well as a major fellowship program.
This past spring Greene taught a graduate seminar called “Public History: Museums, Monuments, and Memory,” in which he introduced students to both the field called “public history” and the day-to-day work of public historians. The former might engage with complex questions of memory, commemoration, and memorialization while the latter often involves more prosaic matters of administration and institution-building. There is always overlap between theory and practice however, particularly when it comes to the relationship between narrative and audience. “What you create in a public history space has to work for multiple audiences at once,” Greene says. “It might have to work for a high schooler walking through the exhibition and for a specialist who knows a lot about the subject. That’s one of the most interesting challenges of public history.”
Another challenge, Greene notes, is how public history is often stretched between the past and the present. “Public history,” he says, “so often becomes a proxy for contemporary political debates.” The USHMM exhibit, “Americans and the Holocaust,” raised questions about the responsibilities of the United States during a refugee crisis; whether the U.S. should get involved in what the public considers a “foreign war”; and how the U.S. should act in the face of genocide. Greene and his colleagues tried to immerse audiences in the historical context of the midcentury so that museumgoers might be better informed about contemporary debates, while at the same time challenging overly simple conflations of then with now. “There is a strong desire among public historians to say that our work is relevant to the contemporary moment,” Greene says, “and yet this coexisting desire to try to get people to think historically.”
The kind of work that Greene does requires greater intellectual agility than most historians are used to. He has co-written or co-edited companion books for both his Civil War and Holocaust history exhibits (Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader was published just last year) and now he directs a center of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities ranging over several continents and many centuries. “This is one of the things I love about public history: the opportunity to be a generalist and to take on big topics,” Greene says. When he started work on “Americans and the Holocaust,” the museum director handed him the topic and asked him to tell a new story. “That’s a huge, fun challenge,” Greene says.
Greene took the helm at the Newberry just six months before the pandemic began. Now that businesses and institutions are beginning to open up he is looking ahead to the library’s immediate future. He and his staff have started to think about how to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in just four years. Greene also hopes to better connect the Newberry to its home city. He wants the library to function as “a space of ideas for Chicagoans—for people who love books, who love to read, who love to engage with ideas around books.” This year the library and the Pattis Family Foundation have established a new award for a book that advances an understanding of Chicago’s history, people, and culture. Greene is also working to build greater connections between scholars and the public as well as to open the library to particular groups in Chicago that might benefit from its vast collections. Finally, the Newberry is planning a major initiative for 2024 called “Indigenous Chicago” that will consider the long history of regional peoples and cultures as well as contemporary Indigenous communities.
Even as he leads the Newberry and expands its programming Greene plans to continue teaching at Northwestern, helping another generation of historians consider how to tell stories that are grounded in the past and also relevant to a complex and at times overshadowing present.