Faculty

Jennifer A. Scott is an anthropologist, curator, public historian and museum expert. Her work, for over 25 years, explores connections between arts, history, place and social justice.

In 2022, The National Urban League appointed Jennifer as the founding Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Urban Civil Rights Museum (UCRM) expected to open in Harlem, New York in 2025. UCRM will be New York’s first museum dedicated to civil rights – and one of the first in the nation to focus on the history of civil rights in the North. The new Museum represents a historic opportunity to build a premier cultural and historical institution that will concentrate on the exploration of those narratives specific to the history of the Black freedom struggle that expanded dramatically in the aftermath of the Great Migration of Blacks northward in urban environments across America.

Prior to her post at UCRM, Professor Scott served in the inaugural position of Senior Vice President of Exhibitions and Programs at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American  History in Detroit, one of the nation's earliest and most significant black arts, history and cultural institutions. Before the Wright, she served, for nearly six years, as Director and Chief Curator at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, a historic landmark and feminist museum in Chicago that elevated immigrant rights and racial and econmic justice. At Hull-House, Jennifer led the exhibitions, community engagement efforts and overall vision of the museum, launching a number of ground-breaking exhibitions and programs both within and outside the museum’s walls. In 2019, the Museum was recognized with the Award for Excellence in Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice by the Association of Midwest Museums.

In Chicago, Jennifer also served as co-chair of the Chicago Monuments Project Advisory Committee, appointed in 2020 by Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot. The commission was created to lead a city-wide initiative that would help rethink the city’s monuments and public memorials, create public engagement opportunities around problematic monuments and re-imagine new monuments and public art commissions. The project addressed the hard truths of Chicago’s racial history, confronted the ways in which that history has and has not been memorialized, and worked towards develop a framework for marking public space that elevates new ways to memorialize Chicago’s history more equitably and accurately. Jennifer was also appointed by Mayor Lightfoot to the City of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council in 2020. She served as co-chair for the City’s Museum Task Force created to help museums re-open under the pandemic. And in 2020, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker also appointed Jennifer to the newly re-activated Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission to provide guidance for genocide education, public memorial and commemoration across the State. 

Before her work in Chicago, Professor Scott served as the Vice Director and Director of Research for a decade at Weeksville Heritage Center, a museum and nationally significant historic site in Brooklyn, New York, that memorializes a Free Black, independent community in the 19^thcentury. There, she led the museum's research efforts and co-curated a number of public programs and exhibitions, including two multi-site history and public art exhibitions: In Pursuit of Freedom, which explored the anti-slavery and abolition history of Brooklyn, and, Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn in partnership with Creative Time (2014) that explored historical practices of community resistance. Jennifer was proudly part of the team that helped to restore and re-interpret the historic site and develop its trademark innovative programming, community engagement and new applications of history, culture and the arts. She helped to build a new $40 million modern center on the site and transform the emerging campus into a present-day cultural destination.

As an oral historian, Jennifer launched Weeksville’s oral history project, producing Weelsville's first audio archive in over 50 years. This included "The Lost Jazz Shrines of Brooklyn," the first and only Brooklyn jazz oral history archive. The Weeksville oral histories tell stories that touch on a nearly a century of Brooklyn history. Jennifer has conducted oral history and genealogy workshops and institutes with artists, community organizations and universities, and served on oral history advisory boards, including StoryCorps Griot, a national oral history project, which collected the stories of African Americans throughout the US, in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture, the American Folklife Center and the Library of Congress. She also served as an oral historian for Brooklyn Historical Society’s Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG), a project to encourage dialogue about differences and to challenge existing social, racial, ethnic, and national, categories.   

Jennifer serves on a number of boards. She is currently the Vice President for the Association of Midwest Museums, a Board Member for the National Association for Museum Exhibition, and in 2022 she was appointed to editorial board of The Public Historian, a journal of the National Council on Public History.

Professor Scott has taught at The New School for Public Engagement in New York for more than 20 years, and has served as core faculty for a combined 12 years in the graduate program of Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at Pratt Institute’s Art and Cultural Management Graduate School, where she designed and taught the foundational course, Cultural Pluralism in the US: Museum Exhibitions and Issues of Cultural Representation. Professor Scott teaches courses in arts and civic engagement, cultural anthropology, race and ethnic studies, global studies and museum studies. She researches, writes and lectures locally and internationally on arts and social change, public memory and place, contested histories and innovative strategies for museums and public history sites. At The New School, Professor Scott is also a Faculty Member on the Creative Community Development Advisory Committee. 

As a Fulbright Scholar, Professor Scott has conducted anthropological and art historical research in West Africa, studying women dressmakers, textiles, cloth and material culture in urban Accra, Ghana and throughout the region.  She is a contributor to a number of museum, heritage and history publications.

Jennifer is a co-author and co-editor of Anywhere but Here: Black Intellectuals, the Atlantic World and Beyond (University Press of Mississippi, 2015/  2017), a volume expanding the traditional boundaries of the “Black Atlantic” and presenting new research on international and historical intellectual exchanges from the 19^thcentury to the present. Other recent publications include: a contribution to Transforming Community Development Through Arts and Culture (2019), “Statues of Limitation: Are Museums the Rightful Home for Confederate Monuments?”(2019); “ “Designing for Outrage: Inviting Disruption and Contested Truth Into Museum Exhibitions”(2017);and “Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-first Century at a Post-Emancipation Site" (2015). Professor Scott  holds degrees in Philosophy, African American Studies/History, and Anthropology from Stanford University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, respectively. 

Contributor to Where The Future Came From: A Collective Research Project on the Integral Role of Feminism in Chicago’s Artist-Run Culture From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed., Meg Duguid, Soberscove Press, Chicago IL, 2020.

Contributor to Transforming Community Development Through Arts and Culture, eds., Jeremy Liu & Victor Rubin from PolicyLink and Lyz Crane from ArtPlace America. Chapter: “Community History, Identity, and Social Change: Reflections from Researchers on the Potential of Arts & Culture.” Community Development, Innovation Review, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Volume 14, Issue 2, 2019. / Innovation Review 2019-2.

Contributor to Eds.,Yesomi Umolu, Sepake Angiama, and Paulo Tavares,…and other such stories, exhibition catalog of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Columbia University Press, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, October 2019.

Statues of Limitations:Are Museums the Rightful Home for Confederate Monuments?” co-authored by Janeen Bryant, Jennifer Scott and Suzanne Serif, American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Magazine, March-April 2019. 

“Supporting Vibrant Neighborhoods: How Do Museums Address Displacement?" Association of Midwest Museums, June 9, 2018.

“Are Museums the Rightful Home for Confederate Monuments?” American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) Blog, April 3, 2018. Co-authored by: Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff as a preview for a session at the 2018 AAM annual meeting. 

"Designing for Outrage: Inviting Contested Truth Into Museum Exhibitions" (in Exhibition, National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME) (Spring 2017)

Contributor to Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, Third Edition, Edward Alexander, Mary Alexander and Juliee Decker; Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 3rd edition, March 2017.

Co-Editor for  Museums and Civic Discourse: Past, Present and Emerging Futures, (forthcoming- project:2015- Present)  

“Resources on Justice – Jennifer Scott,” Open Engagement, April 19, 2017. 

“Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-first Century at a Post-Emancipation Site,” (The Public Historian, University of California Press, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 73–88, May 2015).

Anywhere but Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond, (University Press of Mississippi/ January 2015; Paperback September 2017)

“History Off the Chain: Liberating the Narrative,” (Inspiring Action: Museums and Social Change, Museumsetc/ Edinburgh [2009]; reprinted 2016)

“Taken Not Granted: Radical Democratic Concepts of Freedom in Museums,” (The Radical Museum: democracy, dialogue & debate, MuseumID/ 2011)

“The Relevancy – Driven Museum,” (The Museum: Agent of Social Change, Heritage365/ 2008)

“Exodus in Limestone,” Hidden New York: A Guide to Places that Matter (Rutgers University Press/ 2006)