Rose oversees the teams responsible for all of the items in the vast MNHS collections as the Senior Director of Library, Archives, and Collections. A historian by training, she sees collections as the foundation of every story we tell, and she is deeply committed to making them more accessible and meaningful to all.
Prior to joining the Minnesota Historical Society, Rose spent seven years at the Newberry Library in Chicago, first as the Director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies and then as the Vice President for Research and Education. She also previously worked as the Program Manager for the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, primarily working on the development of their digital archive project.
Rose’s own academic work explores Indigenous history across the Great Lakes, especially related to public history and memory. She is an award-winning author and has worked on and written about several public history projects. Her first book, Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory (2024) takes readers into the heart of the debate over who has the right to represent Native history by tracing one Tribe’s 50-year fight to recover their historical materials from colonial museums and archives and rewrite their history in public spaces. She is a co-director of the Indigenous Chicago project, a multifaceted public history project that was awarded the Best of Illinois History Award from the Illinois Historical Society.
Rose’s work on repatriation, digital projects, and representations of Indigenous history in the public has been published by the journal Native American and Indigenous Studies, Routledge Press, the Chicago Tribune, and the National Council on Public History. She holds a BA in History and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota.