This session explores what public histories look like beyond local and national frames, using the Indian Ocean as a generative thought space for these questions. In the edited volume What is Public History Globally? Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik propose “Like culture, public history comes from somewhere: it is local; it is from 'around here'—a locality, region, state or nation.” In the Indian Ocean, where people, texts, objects, and cultural forms are constantly in motion, our session asks what public history might look like beyond the local. In particular, how do Indian Ocean histories, with their mobile geographies and methods, allow us to rethink assumptions about how historians engage publics in conversations about the past? Beginning with the Dutch Empire and its postcolonial present in Indonesia and South Africa, Saarah Jappie asks what the circulation of stories about the seventeenth-century Sufi scholar Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar tells us about which pasts remain rooted locally and which travel across the ocean. Turning to contemporary debates around heritage sites linked to enslavement and indenture in Mauritius under French and British colonial rule, Nathan Marvin examines how Indian Ocean experiences invite scholars to rethink public histories of slavery and memory politics often centered on the Atlantic. Following the making and unmaking of a library in the Indian Ocean port city of Karachi, Andrew Amstutz examines how libraries and their mobile texts can address larger public history questions related to memory and the transition from British colonial rule to independence. Turning to diasporic mediascapes, Julia Stephens asks what historians can learn from oceanic roots researchers about multimedia research and publicly engaged scholarship that resist the Eurocentric logics and profit-seeking algorithms of websites like Ancestry.com.

By rethinking where we locate public histories to center trans-local pasts, the papers also raise questions about the who, what, when, and how of publicly engaged history. Rather than assuming that historians should lead these conversations, the papers foreground different actors – from local librarians to Instagram influencers – in multi-directional exchanges about the many different ways that we weave the past into the present. The papers also range across sites of different scale and mediums – from UNESCO-recognized world heritage sites to ephemeral traces of life stories – to ask what Indian Ocean histories offer public historians. By expanding the range of actors and sites, we also productively challenge the notion that the endpoint of public history should be a shared past to instead open new possibilities for both connection and dissent.