The Reid Public History Institute announces a new Community Fellows program. Each year community fellows will join our public history scholars, students and local partners on the campus of UNLV, in the city of Las Vegas and the thriving cultural landscapes of the Mojave Desert. Fellows are collaborators on our community-based research initiatives and join us to share the experience of collaborative public history research and actively work in person with students and professors on current projects.

The 2025 Community Fellow is Michael Blum, executive director of Sea of Clouds and lead researcher on our shared National Park Service/CESU Grants in support of the "History of California Surfing Multiple Documentation." This innovative research project is creating significant new National Register of Historic Places documentations as part of a unique collaboration between the National Park Service Community Partners Program, Sea of Clouds, a nonprofit preservation practice interested in landscapes through the communities connected to them, and the Reid Public History Institute. The collaborators researched and drafted a series of  historic preservation documents for sites and cultural landscapes associated with the history of surfing in California. These documents will serve as foundational case-studies for future preservation work on coastal sites in California and nationally. The project also created a new model of three-part research collaboration between community organizations, a research university and the NPS.