DrLinda Young

Linda Young is a historian, curator and teacher. The focus of her historical
work is social and cultural aspects of 19th century personal and domestic life
in the Anglo world, which spreads for context into imperial, colonial and
gender history from the 18th into the 20th centuries. (See Middle Class
Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia, Britain, Palgrave-
Macmillan, 2003). As a museum-based historian, Linda specialises in material
culture as historical evidence, with special interest in personal and domestic
assemblages. In the 1980s-90s, Linda worked as a curator at the Museum of
Applied Arts & Sciences, Sydney (now the Powerhouse Museum); the Western
Australian Museum, Perth; and as a professional historian, collections
management and interpretation consultant in Adelaide. In all locations, she
also worked on historic sites, requiring broad heritage management skills. She
taught Cultural Heritage Management at the University of Canberra for many
years before moving to Deakin in 2005. In Canberra she spent ten years as a
volunteer with the Canberra & District Historical Society's Blundell's Cottage
- so she knows and appreciates the volunteer perspective on heritage
management, as well as the paid side of the business! Having worked widely
around the country, Linda has knowledge, experience and friends in many
places. This professional career has furnished assorted studies of genres of
heritage, such as house museums and museum villages, and arts-and-industry
collections and their antecedent great exhibitions. With the advantage of the
slightly detached stance of academe, Linda also writes as a reviewer of museum
exhibitions/interpretive presentations in journals. Her interests in heritage
genres and communication converge in the field of heritage interpretation and
the audiences for whom it is developed. She continues to work as a consultant,
mainly developing site interpretation plans, museum strategic development
plans and in the assessment of cultural significance. Linda is a member of
sundry heritage, museum, object, archaeology and history committees in
Australia and internationally.