Benjamin Filene is associate professor and director of public history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where since 2006 he has taught courses on museum and historic site interpretation, the practice of public history, and American popular music. He is co-editor of the anthology Letting Go? Historical Authority in a User-Generated World (The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage/Left Coast Press, 2011), which includes two essays by him: one on StoryCorps, the national interviewing project, and another on his Minnesota Historical Society exhibition Open House: If These Walls Could Talk. In the book, 19 leading cultural practitioners—including Nina Simon, Michael Frisch, Kathleen McLean and Fred Wilson—address questions of ownership in the world of Web 2.0 and explore the implications of 21st-century audiences that create, rather than just receive, historical interpretation. Filene is also the author of Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), named a "Notable Book of 2001" by the New York Times Book Review.
