Faculty Profile: Daniel Kerr
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Daniel Kerr Assoc Professor History
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The Humanities Truck driver seat
Daniel Kerr is the director of American University's Humanities Truck program and the associate director of its public history program. He is the president-elect of the Oral History Association.
Kerr specializes in the fields of community history, oral history, and public history. The projects he has initiated, including the Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project, the Shenandoah Valley Oral History Project, and the Homeless Voices Amplification Cooperative in Washington, DC, have gained inspiration from the traditions of popular education, participatory action research, and people's history. With each project, Kerr seeks to honor the "shared authority" inherent in the oral histories and documents generated throughout the research process.
His book Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio offers answers to the question, "Who benefits from homelessness?" Through his work, Kerr seeks to explore the relationship between activism, social change, and history.
Engaged History
The Humanities Truck
HIST-467 Oral History
CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: What Causes Homelessness?
History of urban inequality, boosterism, development, gentrification, low wage labor, and homelessness. He has also done extensive research on the history of the poultry industry in the twentieth century.
Dan Kerr published Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio, which takes the reader on a sweeping tour of Cleveland's history from the late nineteenth-century through the early twenty-first. Kerr is currently working on a manuscript addressing the research he conducted with the Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project where he has interviewed close to 200 homeless people and has facilitated dozens of workshops and meetings in the shelters and drop-in centers of Cleveland. He addresses this work in detail in his article, "We Know What the Problem Is," Oral History Review, Winter/Spring 2003. From 2005-2011, Kerr taught at James Madison University where he directed the Shenandoah Valley Oral History Project and researched and taught a class on the history of the poultry industry. Kerr specializes in the fields of environmental history, urban social history, community history, oral history, and public history. Kerr has made an active effort to make his research accessible and relevant to those who promote social justice in the community.
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