Rate My Professor Amy Tyson

Amy M. Tyson is Associate Professor of History in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, where she also serves as Director of Professional History Internships. She earned her PhD from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Tyson joined DePaul in 2006 as the public history hire, charged with creating an undergraduate public history concentration. She has also directed the American Studies program and is a member of the HumanitiesX Leadership Team and Advisory Council. Her career emphasizes bridging academic history with public engagement through internships, experiential learning, and collaborative projects.

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.