Rate My Professor Amy Tyson

Tyson's research interests include public history, oral history, museum studies, material culture, historical memory and performance, modern U.S. cultural history, U.S. women’s history, and Chicago history. Her book, The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), analyzes emotional labor among public history interpreters at living history sites. Key publications feature chapters such as "Pageant" in The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field (Taylor and Francis, 2019), "Reenacting and Reimagining the Past" in A Companion to Public History (Wiley, 2018), and "Skirting Boundaries" in Queer Twin Cities (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She authored "Working to Connect: Oral Histories of Illinois Public Historians at the State Bicentennial" in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (2018) and contributed a book review to The Public Historian (2018). In 2023, Tyson co-edited Chicago Mosaic: Immigrant Stories of Objects Kept, Lost or Left Behind with Chris Solís Green through Big Shoulders Books. She teaches courses on historical memory, oral history, and immigration, including team-taught classes creating oral histories to humanize immigrant experiences.