I currently serve as the Digital Initiatives Director at the Indiana Historical Bureau (IHB), a division of the Indiana State Library. In this role, I am continuing my previous work with Hoosier State Chronicles as well as overseeing Indiana Memory, a state-wide hub for digitized historical materials, including photographs and manuscripts. I also have a public role at the agency, working with libraries and historical societies across the state on digitizing aspects of their collections.

I previously worked at IHB as a research intern, from 2015-2016. During that time, I wrote essays on a wide variety of topics related to Indiana history. As the institutional manager of the state’s historical marker program, IHB also assigned me to a marker project, on the geodetic surveyor Jasper Sherman Bilby.

From 2018 to 2019, I served as the Communications Director/ Archives and History Advocate for the Indiana Archives and Records Administration. During my tenure, I expanded the agency’s social media presence, launched a video series for highlighting its collections, completed exhibits, and cultivated relationships with other history outlets, including Hoosier History Live and the POLIS Center.

Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana’s statewide newspaper digitization program, has nearly one million pages of historic newspapers available online to the public for free. I worked on this project for two years, shepherding over 100,000 pages towards digitization while writing historical blogs and making historical videos based on newspaper articles.

My research focused on orator and politician Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899). He was one of the most popular and influential figures during the “Golden Age of Freethought” in the United States, from the 1870s to the 1910s. Its supporters advocated for skepticism, science, and the separation of church and state. However, his role as a “public intellectual” has been challenged by scholars of the period, who argue that he was merely a popularizer of ideas. My conclusion does not adequately describe Ingersoll’s role within the period. Rather, Ingersoll was a synthesizer of ideas, making complex concepts of philosophy, theology, science, and history into palatable lectures and books for an eager and understanding public. As a complementary counterpoint to his role as synthesizer, he also spurred a multiplicity of responses from believers and nonbelievers alike who imbibed his ideas. As such, his role in the central Midwest, Illinois and Indiana in particular, supports his place as a public intellectual. From his public discourses with the evangelist Dwight Moody and other believers, his influence on the Freethinker Society of Indianapolis, to his answers to Indianapolis clergy, Ingersoll’s experiences in the Midwest solidified his place within American history as a compelling and thoughtful public intellectual.

You can read it here.

Over the last few years, I have given many talks on history and secular humanism for organizations and universities across the country and in Europe. Of these include the National Council of Public History, Midwestern History Association, Indiana Association of Historians, Society of German American Studies, Carmel Clay Public Library, Heartland Unitarian Universalist Church, Center for Inquiry, New School for Social Research, and the University of Münster. If you’re interested in having me come speak to your organization, please email me at justinclarkpubhist@gmail.com.

“Robert Ingersoll, Dwight Moody, and the Iconoclastic Gilded Age,” in The Sower and the Seer: Perspectives on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest, Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021

“The Exuberant Skepticism of Paul Kurtz,” The Truth Seeker, January/April 2022

“The Gentlest Memory of Our World’: Robert Ingersoll and the Memorialization of Abraham Lincoln,” Untold Indiana, October 2023

“The ‘Buzz Wagon’: Studebaker’s Electric Cars,” Untold Indiana, July 2024