Bio | Laura A. Macaluso

To call yourself a generalist is, generally, not a good thing. To be a specialist is where it is at, at least when it comes to rising to the top of a field. Yet I have always been drawn to a little bit of almost everything. That inclination is probably why I fell in love with art history, and why my academic work eventually led beyond a single discipline to a Ph.D. in the Humanities, with a focus on Cultural and Historic Preservation.

My work sits at the intersection of art history, public history, historic preservation, and the humanities. I am interested in the stories embedded in objects and places: what they tell us about the people who made them, the communities that preserved them, and the ways that successive generations have chosen to remember the past. Sometimes those stories are found in works of art. Sometimes they are hidden in a monument, a historic house, a landscape, an archive, or even a seemingly ordinary object.

Art history provides one way into these questions. My books and essays on public art and visual culture, including Art for Hartford: A Capital City and Its Public Art, The Public Artscape of New Haven: Themes in the Creation of a City Image, and Art of the Amistad and the Portrait of Cinqué, examine the relationship between art and the communities in which it exists. My work on monuments has similarly explored how public objects become repositories for memory, identity, and historical interpretation. I served as editor of Monument Culture: International Perspectives on Monuments in a Changing World and have continued to examine monuments as living objects whose meanings change over time.

Other projects begin more explicitly as history. In A History Lover’s Guide to Alexandria and South Fairfax County, Historic Virginia: A Tour of More Than 75 of the State’s Top National Landmarks, and A Guide to Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, I approached historic places through the people, objects, and stories that give them meaning. More recently, my research has continued to move between local history and larger questions of national memory. My work on Benedict Arnold, for example, considers how an American military hero became a symbol of treason and how that memory has been constructed through monuments, markers, museums, letters, maps, artworks, popular culture, and even the physical remains of places associated with his life.

This approach is at the heart of Objectify Benedict Arnold: Making Memory of America’s Traitor, a digital humanities project developed through the H-Net Spaces Cohort. Created with Christine Peffer, the project brings together material culture, archival research, public history, and digital interpretation to examine the many ways Arnold has been remembered across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Britain. The project reflects a larger interest of mine: using objects and places not simply as illustrations of history, but as evidence through which history can be investigated and understood.

Identifying and teasing out these stories is the method to the madness. It is also, I think, fundamentally a humanities pursuit. The humanities encourage us to look across disciplinary boundaries and to ask not only what happened, but why particular stories, objects, places, and memories matter to us now.

Placemaking is the concept that brings much of my work together. Creating a sense of place involves far more than buildings or geographic boundaries. It encompasses historic sites and contemporary art, parks and landscapes, museums and libraries, monuments and memorials, community gardens, farmers’ markets, walking paths, and trails. All of these places accumulate layers of meaning.

In my work, placemaking means using history in conjunction with contemporary needs to develop exhibitions, programs, public art, and public history that help communities understand the places they inhabit. It asks us to consider how history is presented, whose stories are visible, whose stories have been overlooked, and how the interpretation of the past can contribute to the cultural life of a community.

What is it like to do this kind of work? Research in libraries and archives is only half the fun, and it is fun. The other half is going to the places themselves. I want to stand in front of the monument, walk through the historic house, visit the museum, examine the landscape, or find the object in its original or present setting. I want to see how a place actually works and, when possible, to understand what it means to the people who encounter it.

One of my earliest experiences with this kind of place-based work was as a Student Conservation Association intern at Mesa Verde National Park in 1995, the year after I graduated from college. In that pre-Internet era, I met park rangers and archaeologists, an artist and her husband, and volunteers who joined us on a nighttime hike to listen for owls. We were a hodgepodge of humanity brought together by a particular landscape: the flat, green mesas, the scent of juniper and pine, and the prehistoric architecture of kivas and cliff dwellings.

It was also my introduction to the unexpected ways that personal experience becomes part of our understanding of place. That summer included my first visit to a Walmart, in Cortez, Colorado, and my first experience of what I understood then as “Indian Country,” where I ate frybread. Looking back, those details are not incidental. They are part of the complicated accumulation of experiences through which we come to know a place. High culture and popular culture, the ancient and the contemporary, the scholarly and the everyday all coexist.

My career has continued to move between these worlds. I have worked in museums and historic sites, conducted archival and field research, written books and scholarly essays, developed digital humanities projects, presented at national conferences, and written grants for nonprofit organizations working in the arts, humanities, education, historic preservation, environmental stewardship, and social services. Grant writing has become another form of public humanities work for me: a way of connecting ideas, institutions, communities, and resources so that projects can move from conception to reality.

I have also contributed to broader public conversations about history, public art, and monuments, including writing for the Made by History in TIME Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer and I continue to publish across academic, professional, and public-facing platforms including the Public Art Dialogue, American Historical Review, The Public Historian, and Commonplace, The Journal of Early American Life.

Digital tools have expanded the possibilities for this work. I created the first online catalog of New Haven’s public art collection through the Public Art Archive as well as a special digital exhibit on the CETA Murals in New Haven, and have contributed historical research and documentation to platforms including Clio and Wikimedia Commons. These projects allow research that might once have remained in a library, archive, or scholarly publication to reach a much wider audience.

My professional life has also taken me beyond the United States. As a Fulbright Scholar, I worked with the Swaziland National Museum in 2008–2009, and I subsequently worked on an Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation project there. In 2025–2026, I returned to Eswatini through the Peace Corps Virtual Service Pilot Program, working with the Matsapha Town Council on partnership and resource mobilization. These experiences reinforced something I had first learned at Mesa Verde: cultural preservation is never simply about preserving the past. It is about people deciding what matters, why it matters, and how the past can contribute to the future.

I hold a Ph.D. in Humanities with a concentration in Cultural and Historic Preservation from Salve Regina University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, an MA in Art History from Syracuse University’s Italian Renaissance Art program in Florence, Italy, and a BA in Art History and English from Southern Connecticut State University. I also have Grant Professional Certification (GPC) from the Grants Professionals Certification Institute. My professional affiliations include serving on the editorial boards of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) and the Grants Professional Association (GPA).

I am particularly interested in the space between scholarship and public engagement: the point at which research becomes an exhibition, a monument, a museum label, a walking tour, a digital archive, a grant-funded community project, or a story that helps someone see a familiar place differently.

That work also shapes my service to cultural and community organizations. I have served in leadership roles with the Cumberland County Regional Library Foundation and the Amelia Givin Free Public Library. At Craighead House, I chair the Archives & Museum Committee, and was a volunteer for four years with the Appalachian Trail Museum at Pine Grove Furnace State Park. Through this work, I continue to see libraries, museums, historic sites, parks, and public spaces not as separate institutions, but as parts of the larger cultural landscape through which communities write themselves a story everyday.

Perhaps, then, being a generalist is not quite the problem I once thought it was. My subjects may range from Renaissance art to American monuments, from historic houses to public libraries, from Benedict Arnold to Lafayette, and from archaeological landscapes to digital archives. What connects them is a persistent question: How do objects, places, and stories become meaningful to us, and what can those meanings tell us about who we have been and who we are becoming?

That question has taken me into archives, museums, historic sites, parks, classrooms, town halls, digital platforms, and communities around the world, from New Zealand and Johannesburg, to the small town in Connecticut where I grew up. It continues to be the thread connecting my work as a cultural historian, preservationist, writer, grant professional, and public humanities scholar.