John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study

Malgorzata J. (M.J.) Rymsza-Pawlowska is an interdisciplinary cultural historian of the 19th- and 20th-century United States and an associate professor of history and public history at American University. Her research interests include public history, historiography, visual and material culture, and communications and media history. She is the author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), which traces the emergence of immersive engagement with the past in postwar American culture and numerous articles in scholarly journals. M.J. is a New America Us@250 fellow and Smithsonian Research Associate.

 

M.J. serves on advisory boards for the D.C. History Center and the Humanities Truck. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of Humanities D.C. and was series editor for the National Park Service and National Council on Public History’s 2021-2025 American Revolution 250th Commemoration Scholars' Forums.  

 

She is currently working on two new book projects—the first about the history of visitors and newcomers to Washington entitled Your Nation’s Capital: How Visitors Made Washington D.C., and Vice Versa. She is also completing a shorter monograph called The Historian and the Historian-ish: Notes on the Future of the Past, which is under advance contract with UNC Press.