Dr. Peter Cullen

A History Department Alumnus, Dr. Peter Cullen completed both his B.A. (1990-1994) and M.A. (1994/95) at Dalhousie University. During his time at Dalhousie he studied criminality and institutional effectiveness in Early Modern Italy for both his undergraduate and Master’s theses, Dr. Gregory Hanlon acting as supervisor for both. He currently works as director of the Ross Farm Museum, a living history museum located in Lunenburg County, and part of the provincial family of 28 museums which constitute the Nova Scotia Museum. For this edition of History News, Dr. Cullen agreed to provide a series of responses to interview style questions both about his general educational background and research interests, as well as relating to his new position in the museum sector.

Q: When did you spend time at Dalhousie? What year did you graduate? From what degree programme did you graduate and if applicable, what was your research focus?

I did my B.A. (honours) and M.A. in European history at Dalhousie between 1990-1994 (B.A.) and 1994/95 (M.A.). I focused on criminality and institutional effectiveness in Early Modern Italy for both the honours thesis and the master’s thesis. Greg Hanlon was my supervisor for both.  My undergraduate minor was in Spanish, and my complementary subject was the history of material culture with Jack Crowley.  

Q: What are your present research interests if any?

With administrative duties piling up over the past few years, I haven’t had a chance to do much academic research.  My most recent publications have been in the field of study abroad program development.  My interests, however, lie in the relationships between agricultural systems and social development. More precisely, the way agricultural social contexts, and their dismantling, shape the way basic cultural functions occur in societies.  The move from pre-industrial agriculture to mechanical and now “scientific” agriculture has ripples in our cultural approaches to the planet as a whole.  What is taught as only one facet of economic history actually has significant impact on even how we perceive money, assign value to objects, labour and belief, as well as shapes our cultural attitudes to time, “quality” and social relationships.  Currently I hope to be able to continue a project on comparing how Mediterranean agricultural contexts and Northern European agricultural contexts influenced long-term cultural attitudes toward output productivity that have informed the geography of development from the mid 18^th century onward.

Q: Where are you presently working, and how have you arrived at that position from the time you graduated from Dalhousie? What drew you to the museum sector? What is your favourite aspect of your present position?

I am currently the Executive Director of Ross Farm Museum in New Ross, Nova Scotia.  I left my job(s) in Italy and moved back to Nova Scotia in March, 2019 to take up the position at Ross Farm.  I jumped at the post as soon as it opened up. I am originally from the New Germany area, although grew up for much of my life in the US.

After Dalhousie I began my doctorate at Rutgers, studying smuggling and tax fraud in the Duchy of Urbino in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.  I finished at the University of Bari (Italy), with the thesis reformulated to reflect the doctorate program in Economic History.  After the doctorate I became a lecturer in history, business and culture at the University of Urbino, Italy where I held positions as lecturer in the Department of International Studies, as well as North American relations manager for the university as a whole.  At the same time I was Resident Program Director for Villanova University in Pennsylvania.  On any given year I had about 650 Italian students in our language and culture for business program, taught masters courses in Teaching Italian Language and Culture to Foreigners, and taught Italian economic history and geography for the Business Culture in the Italian Context program that I developed together with Kevin Clark from Villanova School of Business.  As well, I worked to develop other study abroad programs based on thematic experiential learning practices in Urbino.  Working between cultures has reinforced in me the need for educators to focus on the very recent (50-150 yrs) role of agricultural culture in shaping the expression of our contemporary cultures (in this case, Italy and the US – with sub-national cultural divisions/differences respected).  We talk about the food crisis and global sustainability, but often look toward fore-ward thinking technological solutions without putting them in their proper context.  As Executive Director at Ross Farm, a living history farm museum, my staff and I focus strongly on precisely this problem. We aim to demonstrate and teach 19^th century farming practices in upland Nova Scotia. This is an excellent professional context in which to use my academic background. It is an arena in which to explore my academic interests from the theoretical to the practical, but also – if this makes sense – to expand those academic interests into everyday functionality.  I used to teach marketing, now I have to direct the marketing for a museum.  I used to study the role of sheep and grain in local and inter-territorial finance, now I have a flock of Cotswolds (really the Ferrari of sheep) and Southdowns as teaching tools for our visitor experience.  I used to train teachers to go into the classroom, now I have to build experiential learning programs with Ross Farm staff that can use be used with visitors and as workshop or course-level educational offers in the field, in the blacksmith’s shop, in the carpentry workshop, in the kitchen – and often in multiple sites.  This job allows me to go from big-picture to minutiae and back again in a single conversation without losing relevance.  My education in Early Modern history applies, my education in the history of material culture applies, my professional development as an educator and my background in south shore farming communities apply.  If I get sick of working on budgets, policy, reports, or program development, there is always barn work to do.  I’m new still, but the depth of learning potential at Ross Farm Museum is extensive. Farms in general, and farm museums in particular, are like that,  there is always something new to learn from the past and from the future.

Q: As the director of Ross Farm, how do you feel living history museums contribute to historical education? How do their strengths differ from more traditional history museums?

A successful living history museum provokes curiosity and dialogue.  In a way we play a trick with our period costumes and seemingly “old-timey” ways. What is really happening is the confrontation of past and present, as well as theory and practice.  A living history museum genuinely has to perform the actions of past societies as well as permissible according to contemporary building codes, OH&S practices, labour laws, social mores etc. and cultural expectations all the while seemingly rooted in some past time period.  We have an opportunity to bring visitors and students along with us into a mental space that in our case interprets 19^th century upland Nova Scotia farming, but also to have them understand that they are participating in a museum interpretation involving real horses, oxen, sheep, chickens, grain, vegetables, wood, leather and steel.  If it rains too much, our crops – our demonstration crops – could fail just the same as a commercial farmer’s.  At the same time, our programming often obviates significant changes in formal and informal institutional cultures over the past 200 years. We can churn butter as a demonstration, but health and safety regulations prevent us from serving that butter since it was not produced in a certified production area with certified equipment.  A living history museum benefits from being able to open up these discussions.  Whatever a person might think about the justness of particular type of regulation or law governing some social practice or another, we get to contrast these between past and present.  As well, since we are a farm, we act as a place of preservation for heritage breeds and varieties of livestock and plant stock.  In the Ross Farm story, we also can contrast social norms and mores, such as school practices and gender roles. Given the specific story of Ross Farm, we also get to look at how intercultural relations changed between First Nations communities and the variety of European settlers that founded the village of New Ross.  As part of the Nova Scotia Museum system, we are mandated to share our stories with others across the province – adding a great deal of contextualization of our story within the history of the province as a whole. We get to experiment with ways to promote an understanding of the past as a fundamental tool, a practical tool, for understanding where we are in society today – and as such hopefully help inform decisions about where we want to go.
            In a more traditional “static display” museum, and I love them, there is the classic problem of “the three second rule”. People are challenged in their attention, and the curator’s job is made more difficult by necessarily making decisions for the visitor as to how to spend their attention.  A living history museum, on the other hand, is about activity, motion, engagement. They are multi-sensory spaces that allow the visitor or student to focus their attention more naturally on things they are interested in, while not escaping the overall context.  A sharp hay mower blade has a specific sound. The wood used by our school students to make mallets has a smell. The steel used in our blacksmithing workshops has a weight.  The barn, stalls and pens are the fora for a thousand little conversations between visitors and livestock.  Today in education people are focusing on “multi-modal learning” as a response to the classic lecture-style.  Living history museums have always had those now well-researched theories and techniques rooted in their very foundations.  Living history museums are participated educational spaces.  They are fundamental to the preservation not only of messages from the past, but of basic educational skill-sets such as problem solving, design thinking, physical attention as well as mental attention, patience, and a healthy respect and appreciation regarding the abilities of humans to impact the world we live in.