RE-IMAGINING PRESERVATION AT LEFFERTS HISTORIC HOUSE
Please join the Historic Preservation program at GSAPP for a lecture by Dylan Yeats, a committed public historian and trained archivist who has directed, curated, and consulted on numerous community memory projects and history exhibits. A proud descendent of refugees who fled ethnic and political persecution in Europe, Yeats earned a master’s in Public History & Archival Management and a doctorate in History from NYU.
This lecture will explain the process and findings guiding the current work to reimagine interpretation and programming at Lefferts Historic House for a preservation-minded audience. Yeats will explain the principles and methods utilized to solicit descendent community guidance and translate that guidance into an actionable new interpretive plan. He will also discuss how difficult decisions were made and offer insights learned along the way. In doing so, Yeats will illustrate how stewards of historic sites and public historians can reimagine preservation and root their work in the specifics of the audiences they seek to reach, the positioning of their staffs and venues, and the mediums of communication available to them.
Dylan Yeats’ scholarship focuses on the “culture war” politics of race, gender, religion, and empire from the Indian Wars of the colonial period to the Islamophobia of today as well as the history of NYC and especially its largest borough, Brooklyn. Yeats is currently Director of Museum Programs and Operations for the Prospect Park Alliance, where he leads the initiative to reimagine the interpretation and programming at Lefferts Historic House to focus on the lives, resistance, and resilience of the Indigenous peoples of Lenapehoking, whose unceded lands the park and house rests upon, and the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family.
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