European History: Digital humanities, public digital history, historical pedagogy, modern East Central Europe, Appalachian Studies
Professor Kelly is the Director of George Mason's award-winning Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Since 2001, Kelly has been either co-director or principal investigator on three major website projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities ($790,000 total funding). Two of these projects, created with his colleague Professor Kelly Schrum, won the James Harvey Robinson Prize in 2007 from the American Historical Association. His current digital public history project centers on the history of the Appalachian Trail, and this project has already generated preliminary funding from the NEH and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
Kelly is also a specialist in the scholarship of teaching and learning in history and is currently past-president of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) and was the organization's president in 2018-2019. His most recent book, Teaching History in the Digital Age was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2013. He is also the author of more than a dozen articles on the intersection of historical pedagogy and digital humanities.
Kelly has received international, national, state, and university awards for his work on historical pedagogy, most recently the 2019 Gutenberg Teaching Award from the University of Mainz (Germany). He has also received the the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia's Outstanding Faculty Award, a Pew National Fellowship from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and George Mason University's Teaching Excellence Award.
He is a trustee of the Romanian-American Foundation and from 1998-2002 he was Chair of the Board of Directors of the Civic Education Project, an international non-governmental organization working to promote democracy in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union.
"Appalachian Trail Histories," a proof of concept digital public history project on the history of America's oldest and most iconic long distance scenic trail. This project combines research by Professor Kelly and his undergraduate students.
Books
Teaching History in the Digital Age, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013, 2016)
World History Matters: A Student Guide to World History Online, with Kristin Lehner and Kelly Schrum, (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009)
Without Remorse: Czech National Socialism in Late Habsburg Austria, (Boulder: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 2007)
Other
“I Just Wanna Move Some Shit,” forthcoming in Handbook of Digital Public History, Serge Noiret and Mark Tebeau, eds. (Berlin: deGruyter, 2019)
“Keynote: Mills Kelly,” in Geschichtsunterricht im 21. Jahrhundert, Thomas Sandkühler, ed. (Berlin: V&R unipress, 2018): 59-66
“The Politics of Public History Education,” in Public History and School. International Perspectives, Marko Demantowsky, ed., (Berlin: deGruyter, 2018): 207-12
"True Facts or False Facts: Which Are More Authentic?" in Past Play, Kevin Kee, ed. (University of Michigan Press, 2014): 309-328
HIST 689 - Teaching and Learning History in the Digital Age
HIST 499 - Senior Seminar in History: 1989, The Year of Miracles
HIST 390 - The Digital Past
HIST 389 - Topics in U.S. History: Lying About the Past
HIST 312 - Nationalism in Eastern Europe
HIST 300 - Introduction to Historical Method: Dead in Virginia
PhD, George Washington University, 1996
MA, George Washington University, 1988
BA, University of Virginia, 1982
“I Just Wanna Move Some Shit” Keynote address at theWinter Symposium on Digital Literacy in Higher Education, University of Rhode Island, January 2017
"Community-Based Learning in the Humanities," The inaugural Michael Mizell-Nelson Public History Lecture in the memorial lecture series dedicated to my friend and colleague, the late UNO professor of history, Michael Mizell-Nelson.
“Playfulness, Authentic Learning, and the Future of Teaching,” invited lecture at the conference Public History International: Beyond school? Comparative Perspectives, Basel, Switzerland, September 2015
“Playfulness, Authentic Learning, and the Future of Teaching,” keynote address, University of Kansas Teaching Summit, August 2015
Phi Beta Kappa keynote speaker, Elon University, April 2015
“Assessing Authentic Learning in Digital Assignments,” a workshop at the annual meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Quebec City, Canada, October 2014
“Counting Digital Humanities Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion,” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, October 2014
“Lying About History,” David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies, Brigham Young University, September 2014
“Blogging for the Historian: Building a Scholarly Career in Social Media,” University of Basel, Kolloquium zur Didaktik der Geschichte und Politik, June 2014
“Exploring, Remixing, Analyzing: Teaching History with Digital Media,” University of Kentucky, April 2014
“Digital Humanities and the End of Selective Ignorance,” Indiana University, Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Analysis, March 2014
“Building a Career Around the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” American Historical Association national conference, January 2014
“Pedagogies of Disruption: What Happens When You Teach Students to Lie?” Invited lecture at the Scholars Lab, University of Virginia, October 2012
"If I stop blogging, what will you tweet about?", invited presentation at the conference Geschichtswissenschaften und Web 2.0, Basel, Switzerland, November 2010
"Embracing Failure: A workshop on failure in the scholarship of teaching and learning and learning from mistakes," International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning annual conference, Liverpool, England, October 2010
"True Facts or False Facts--Which Are More Authentic?" Invited presentation at the conference Playing With Technology in History, Niagra-on-the-Lake, Canada, April 2010
"1989: Looking Back, Looking Forward," Roundtable Chair for discussion between Mikhail Gorbachev, William Webster, and Sergey Chumarov, George Mason University, March 2009
“History Department at George Mason U. Puts the Kibosh on Lying About the Past,” Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2013
“Interview: T. Mills Kelly on ‘Lying About the Past’,” Aleks Krotoski, DML Central, April 2, 2013
“Mischief,” BBC Radio 4, Digital Human series, April 1, 2013
“As Colleges Evolve, So Must Their Presidents,” Jeff Selingo, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2013
“Flipping the Curriculum: Introductory Courses Should Be Just as Good as the Capstone Experience,” Jeff Selingo, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2012
“Here There Be Monsters,” Brendan Fitzgerald, The Morning News, September 21, 2012
“Hoax history is bunk but there are truths to be learned from it,” Times Higher Education, August 2, 2012
“The 10 Most Creative People in Higher Education Today,” OnlineColleges.org, June 20, 2012
Spark: With Nora Young (CBC), interview, June 8, 2012
“The anatomy of the online hoax,” Voice of Russia, May 22, 2012
“How Reddit Caught The Professor That Tricked Wikipedia,” Caribbean Media Vision, May 21, 2012
“GMU Prof Teaches How To Falsify Wikipedia — and Get Caught,” SlashDot.org, May 17, 2012
“Reddit culture well-tuned to spot hoaxes,” BoingBoing.com, May 16, 2012
“The Junkman’s Dilemma: How The Internet Has Changed How We See History,” TechCrunch.com, May 16, 2012
“How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit,” TheAtlantic.com, May 15, 2012
"Graveyard visits offer a lesson in history to Mason students," WashingtonPost.com, March 9, 2011
Gretchen Beasley, Defining Culture, Creating Identity, Building Nations: An Examination of the Polish Sarmatian Myth (2018)
Misha Mazzini Griffith, Towards a Portable Public Sphere: How Technology Created a Discursive Space in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (2017)