Mimi Eisen

Work at HAI

At HAI, Mimi is a historian, writer, and content developer. Whether poring over dusty documents at the archives or workshopping exhibit content with her colleagues, Mimi engages with history in order to advance the frontiers of its influence. She is particularly enthusiastic about combining digital tools—social media, website design, GIS mapping—with rigorous research and elegant narratives to produce meaningful and incisive historical projects for a broad spectrum of people and settings. 

Mimi specializes in civil rights and law in late nineteenth-century America, and owes this focus only partly to sharing a birthday with Abraham Lincoln. Working at HAI has afforded her opportunities to both delve further into her areas of interest and cultivate new ones. Across topics, her work involves exhibit, website, and interactive development; in-depth historical research; multimedia research and acquisition; and custom map design. 

Her clients include:

• National Institutes of Health
• National Purple Heart Hall of Honor
• Pearson Education
• Statue of Liberty Museum
• U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum
  

Her subject-matter expertise includes:

• Interactions between banking and government institutions in early America
• Enslavement and the carceral state during the American Civil War and Reconstruction
• Industrial site activities and land management
• Public and practical knowledge of ostensibly toxic substances
• Climate change development and awareness

Path to HAI

Before joining HAI, Mimi worked as the history specialist at a local company in the Philadelphia area. Primarily, she taught high school-level and AP U.S. history, for which she also developed curricular plans to help students make sense of key players, events, and themes at work in each era. In this capacity, she gained exposure to a wide variety of learning styles and backgrounds, and a keen sense of discrepancies in scholarly and public history narratives. 

In 2018, Mimi received a master’s degree in American history from Brown University, with a secondary focus in digital public humanities. Her work centered on transferring critical underrepresented histories from the academy to the public sphere. In graduate school, Mimi developed a website and GIS project that used her research on late nineteenth-century Philadelphia as a new entry point into discussions of race, civil rights, and memory in modern America. She then wrote on this topic and broader uses of digital public history for the National Council on Public History’s History@Work, and her piece was highlighted as one of the publication’s most widely shared and liked articles of the year. Mimi majored in history at Cornell University, graduating in 2013.