Like air, humanities-driven work is everywhere but taken for granted, so much a part of life that it's easy to overlook.
An academic book or article on history or philosophy counts. The same goes for a local oral history project, an art exhibit, or a dinner conversation about books, movies, or music.
A new open access, peer-reviewed journal, Public Humanitiesaims to strengthen connections between humanities work in universities and the world at large, creating a space for academics and professionals to share what they do and how they do it. And its creation is a sign of how professors and others in higher education want to make the case that, despite the perennial laments about the crisis in the humanities, are very much alive, especially if you look beyond the depressing statistics about funding cuts, threatened departments, and declining careers.
Public Humanities, published by Cambridge University Press, presents itself as a very big tent. The mission statement emphasizes inclusivity and declares the journal “a space for academics, students, activists, journalists, policymakers, professionals, practitioners and non-specialists to connect and share knowledge.” It is open to “all humanities disciplines, geographies, periods, methodologies, authors, and audiences.” That includes, the editors note, anthropology, archaeology, classics, cultural studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, law, linguistics, literary studies, performing arts, religious studies, philosophy, postcolonial studies, queer studies, psychology, sociology, visual arts and women's studies.
“The humanities study the things we humans do (our art, writings, thoughts, religions, governments, histories, technologies and societies) helping us understand who we are, what we do, how we do it, why and with what consequences. “write the founding editors, Jeffrey R. Wilson, a Shakespeare scholar who teaches at Harvard University, and Zoe Hope Bulaitis, assistant professor of liberal arts and natural sciences at the University of Birmingham, in an essay in the first number. In fact, they point out that some people outside of higher education who do what they call public humanities may not even know or care about that word.
The editors plan to publish five or six thematic issues a year, as well as “of the moment” essays on pressing social issues and how work in the humanities intersects with them. One such essay, written by Susan McWilliams Barndt, a political science professor at Pomona College, addresses an existential question her students are asking, especially these days: “Why study humanities when people are dying?”
Upcoming thematic issues will focus on Indigenous public humanities, global literary studies, the Harlem Renaissance and its publics, literature and science in the public sphere, political philosophy, far-right rhetoric, and more. There will also be a “How to” edition, which Wilson describes as “how-to” stories of useful public-facing human skills, such as how to make a podcast.
One of the magazine's editors, Ricardo L. Ortiz, directs the Master's Program in Public and Engaged Humanities at Georgetown University, where he is a professor of Latino literatures and cultures. He is editing an upcoming special issue on “The Public Humanities in Action.” The articles are being peer-reviewed, so Ortiz can't share more than general details, but describes them as case studies that feature associations with historically marginalized and underrepresented groups in the United States and elsewhere.
“They range from projects that engage the literary cultures of local communities, to others that collaborate with public historical archives, to others that model alternative community pedagogies for students working with off-campus partner organizations,” he says. Although based on academic research, the projects focus more on how to collaborate with community partners than on extracting knowledge from them.
Avoid “shortsighted” thinking
That move away from an “extractive” model of research in the humanities resonates with Matthew Gibson. He is the executive director of Virginia Humanities, which supports community-based public humanities projects throughout Virginia. (Almost all US states and territories have a state humanities council.) Gibson is not involved in the new magazine, but welcomes its arrival.
“The more we can focus on the public humanities, both inside and outside the academy, the better off the humanities will be in general,” he says.
Too often there has been “a myopic thinking within the academy that that is where the humanities live and die,” Gibson argues. “And, of course, that's not true at all. They are present in everything we do, everything we become, and we take them with us to whatever career we decide to pursue.”
He would like to see the journal add more non-academic editors to its advisory board, people “who are doing the work, who are at the crossroads between policy, government advocacy, public outreach, and engagement with the public and academia.” .”
According to Bulaitis and Wilson, that's the plan.
“While we're starting with mostly academics in our community, since that's terra firma for an academic journal,” Wilson says, “we'll move to an editorial collective and advisory board that includes members from each of the ten types of humanities public” they outline in their essay in The Manifesto Issue. That “typology,” as they call it, includes activism, pedagogy, and the kind of knowledge acquired in practical humanities work in libraries and museums, journalism, and public policy.
The editors also want the journal to be a safe workspace for non-academics who have practical knowledge to share with academia but are not trained to write for a specialist audience. (The need to be able to translate between academic and public audiences goes both ways, as Devoney Looser, an English professor at Arizona State University and the magazine's editor, points out in an essay on “The need for public writing” included in the debut issue.)
There is no shortage of extra-academic experience waiting to be harnessed.
Robert B. Townsend, director of arts, humanities, and culture programs at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, serves on the journal's editorial board. He is also a long-time analyst of humanities data, including What do people do with those titles?. Humanists work in many fields, and in their experience, what counts as public humanities work in one country or setting does not always count in another, in part because of how such work is funded. Public Humanities could be a meeting place to explore how those definitional differences “may be creating barriers and challenges to the good conversations we could have elsewhere,” he says.
The journal aims to be geographically and conceptually broad. He editorial board It includes many academics working at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also draws from the global humanities community, with members based in Australia, Ghana, Hong Kong, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan and elsewhere. However, there is a linguistic limit; The magazine only publishes articles in English.
The idea for Public Humanities emerged from a panel discussion on presentism, politics, and academia that Wilson attended at the Modern Language Association's annual meeting in 2018. He followed up with an article in the Spring 2019 issue of Profession magazine in which he floated the idea of a magazine. That led to a preliminary conversation with Cambridge University Press, but “I had given up hope of the magazine ever being published,” says Wilson, “until Zoe came along and that's what sparked the project. “Zoe was the one who brought the team together and turned an idea into reality.”
Across the Atlantic, Bulaitis had been researching the changing value of higher education and rising tuition fees in the UK. A colleague at Cambridge University put her in touch with Wilson and the press. “Intellectually we come from very different backgrounds,” he says. “I like all things vintage and Zoe is very current and current.” (Compare the academic books they published in 2020: Wilson”Shakespeare and Trump and Bulaitis'Value and humanities: the neoliberal university and our Victorian heritage.”)
Launching the magazine through an established university press made sense on several fronts. “We were really determined to have a place that would bring these conversations to the heart of traditional academia,” Bulaitis says. “Much work in public humanities is often seen as complementary to people's careers,” he adds. “We didn't agree with that notion and wanted to put it somewhere that would provide longevity, that would include archival processes and a real place for the public humanities” within academia.
The variability of what counts as public humanities creates interesting starting points to explore. One of the editors, Sarah Nuttall, is a professor of literary and cultural studies at the Wit Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The institute, which he led from 2012 to 2022, has a strong emphasis on the public humanities, so he welcomed the arrival of the magazine as “a forum to talk to other people about this around the world.” Nuttall will peer review articles and help recruit other scholars from the Global South to be editors, contributors and reviewers. (At first, she suggested they add a West Africa-based editor. They did: Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang of the University of Ghana.)
In South Africa, Nuttal says, debates about the role of the university and how it should participate in public life follow a different script. “The outreach model, which has defined many US university debates on this topic, assumes that there is a singular community to reach,” he says. In the multi-ethnic context of South Africa, there is a sense that “there may be a problem with university intellectuals from a very unequal country reaching out to that community in an uncomplicated way.” Instead, emphasis has been placed on opening the university to communities traditionally excluded from it.
Nuttall points to attempts to define the public humanities as part of the emergence of critical university studiesthat questions not only what a university is but who it serves.
Academia “has to be a little less pompous and inaccessible, and one way to do that is by going public,” he says. “How can you take really amazing academic research and turn it into social information, public knowledge? It is a constant question that some academics find stressful.”
The new journal could be a place for humanists of all stripes to come together in search of answers.
