Public humanities programs have the potential to engage diverse communities, while addressing the employability challenges faced by many humanities graduates. This article outlines how to build a humanities internship program that pays students to collaborate with local governments, museums, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations, on projects for public good. Through these mutually beneficial partnerships, students apply skills – such as writing, archival research, critical thinking, and data analysis – beyond the classroom, demonstrating the relevance of the humanities in real-world contexts. The article discusses key strategies for developing a sustainable program, including networking to build community partnerships, fundraising through small grants, and evaluating impact on all stakeholders. By reflecting on the successes and challenges of such a program, the article highlights the value of public humanities in preparing students for diverse careers while supporting community-driven projects.

Public dissertations allow doctoral students to engage a broader audience that is often already having conversations about our research topics, whether explicitly or not. The traditional dissertation is usually read by the committee (if you are lucky) and the author. Public projects allow early-career scholars to expand their marketability, relate their abstract topics to concrete discussions, and adapt to the changing demands of the academic space. This article includes a brief case study of the author’s public dissertation to suggest possible avenues for current graduate students and faculty mentors, along with a frank discussion about the pros and cons of such a project. Six tips provide a frank discussion of the pros and cons of such a project and possibilities for graduate students interested in a public project to consider.

This essay will discuss the issue of Native American history and periodization where we are not allowed “premodern” histories. History prior to European contact is relegated to terms like “Pre-Columbian” and consigned to the domain of archeologists. As a reclamation of Native sovereign ancestral presence, I am interested in public humanities as an interdisciplinary way to push against the myths and stereotypes that both confine Indigenous people to static pasts, either displacing ancestors into settler national memory or oblivion. My goals in public humanities are to work toward reclamations of ancient pasts in the so-called Americas from the limited imaginations of settler skull- and arrowhead-collectors toward reasserting the ongoing lived relationships that Natives have with spaces condemned as ruins and materials as relics. I briefly mention my own work in digital curation, Red Coral Stories, to provide counternarratives from European conquest toward expanding Native American presence across space and time.

This article explores the potential of public humanities to bridge the gap between academia and the public by performing the humanities in unconventional spaces. Through two case studies – adapting George Sand’s Indiana for a local theatre production and hosting an outreach booth at a football match for their Pride game – we demonstrate the value of engaging with the public, rather than presenting research to the public. By reflecting on these experiments, we discuss what it means to do the public humanities dialogically and what we learned from this process. Our experiments reveal that effective public humanities require collapsing the divide between academia and the public by meeting audiences where they are and fostering reciprocal learning. By integrating academic insights into popular contexts, we demonstrate how the humanities remain vital and relevant. These initiatives challenge traditional models of outreach, affirming the discipline’s role as a collaborative, dynamic field that thrives through active dialogue with diverse communities.

The humanities cannot go public without publishing. In this contribution to the Manifesto issue of Public Humanities, Daniel Fisher-Livne, Kath Burton, and Catherine Cocks highlight the radically inclusive publishing practices necessary to support the Public Humanities ecosystem. The authors explain how Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities Working Group activities have prepared the ground for future growth, directing attention to the inherently collaborative, multimodal and values-based publishing practices of engaged scholars. This paper builds on the central thesis of the Working Group, calling for the implementation of a radically inclusive ecology of publishing practices that embody and nurture the unique facets, connections and aims of publicly engaged publications.

Public Humanities projects notoriously begin with the bootstrapping commitment of one or two long-suffering and visionary individuals. If they can make it past the turbulent narrows of their beginnings, they often only endure through unrecognized and little-rewarded labor. Gatherings of public humanists can be exercises in commiseration. When you determine that you have enough funding to last one more year, celebration is in order. Such travails naturally lead to the question of how public humanities programs can move beyond being nice extras to become more central to the concerns of our home institutions. How, in short, can the work of public humanists be institutionalized and become part of the everyday humdrum of academic life rather than the desperate scrabbling of the righteous, committed, frantic, and overtired?

The Inclusuem is a collaborative project established in 2012 with international reach and global impact. The three co-directors, Aletheia Whitman, Dr. Rose Paquet, and Dr. Porchia Moore share a mission to “advance new ways of being a museum through dialogue, community building, and collaborative practice related to inclusive practice in museums.” We have provided a platform for over a decade which prompts arts and cultural heritage professionals to push the bounds of museum work to be as expansive and inclusive as possible while enacting structural change. In this piece, we focus on museums as sites where the humanities are made public. Our manifesto proposes a vision for the public humanities in a changing political landscape and will introduce new perspectives for both an emerging museum and an emergent new understanding for the public humanities within museums faced with an antagonistic intellectual and cultural ecosystem.

This essay considers how the nineteenth-century idea of the university as a refuge, constructed by thinkers like John Henry Newman, continues to shape contemporary universities and the field of public humanities. This vision of the university has lasting appeal for obvious reasons. In a culture predicated on speed, slowness is a political act. In a culture of hot takes, cold reasoning often provides necessary context, a wider view. And yet, as W. E. B. Du Bois warns, the “tenacious legend” of the Victorian university is dangerous because it separates the university from mass culture. Building on Du Bois’s thinking, the essay concludes that instead of seeking protection, enclosure, or recognition within university institutions, public humanities practitioners should seek refuge in the relationships of mutual responsibility they foster.

The Being Human Festival, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2024, is the UK’s national humanities research festival, held every November to engage local communities with creative and participatory events that are free to attend. Over its first decade, Being Human has helped transform UK public engagement practices in the humanities, strengthened community ties, and inspired academic and public participants alike. Looking back on 10 years of Being Human, the director of the festival takes readers behind-the-scenes to see who makes it happen, how, and why. Looking forward, the festival aims to further transform public engagement infrastructure, support vernacular knowledge, and expand globally, advocating for the humanities’ indispensability in a democratic society.

This article makes the case for unearthing a long history of public humanities. The story begins with the very emergence of universities in the United States and continues through key moments where people of color and Indigenous people have shaped the history of public humanities. Risam makes the case against allowing the novelty of the term “public humanities” to erase this history and for resisting cooptation of public humanities by the neoliberal university.

The future of public humanities will be determined by the infrastructural investments that support its continued development. These include, in the context of the United States, increased federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities; a serious re-engagement in the material support of new humanities scholarly production by private foundations; and a focused effort by humanities organizations to cultivate philanthropic donors. This manifesto argues that the humanities are the rightful inheritance of every person, regardless of background or position. If we are to take seriously both the resource needs of humanities research—which demand that funds be allocated for highly trained scholars to read, interpret, authenticate, preserve, and circulate primary source material—and the idea that no one has a higher claim than anyone else to these sources and processes and the insights they yield—which demands that individuals outside of the academy explicitly experience them selves as equal participants in the humanities—then our approach to both research infrastructure and public engagement must radically shift to emphasize repair. Repair, here, is the interpersonal, intellectual, strategic, repetitious, time-intensive work of ensuring that every individual can claim this rightful cultural inheritance. It is the work of creating the conditions for encounters between individuals and the vastness of history, culture, and difference. The future of public humanities must be in the creation of replicable models for these encounters, in the knowledge that in every instance, the work of the humanities is and must be unreproducible.

I ran the online classics publication Eidolon from 2015 to 2020. Eidolon sought to make Classics “personal and political, feminist and fun,” publishing more than 500 articles and receiving 3 million total views in its five years of active existence. Because our editors (and many of our writers) were scholars who grew up consuming and producing digital content, we were able to bring a measure of academic rigor and methodology to inform urgent personal and timely essays. Eidolon’s position as both insiders and outsiders to the discipline of Classics made it uniquely suited to address some of the most challenging and necessary conversations facing the field, from white supremacist classical appropriation online to sexual harassment and racial discrimination within the discipline. But the lack of institutional support that allowed total freedom also made the publication vulnerable and contributed to its closure in late 2020. It’s wonderful to have fans, but a publication also needs champions. I argue that, for an online publication to be exciting and fresh but also resilient, it must maintain a delicate balance between fearlessly commenting on the most pressing issues of the day (without, perhaps, waiting for the temporal distance and perspective that academics usually prefer!) while still cultivating the institutional support necessary to weather inevitable challenges. And, most importantly, you need to have fun while doing it.

Lately, my students have been asking: “Why should we be here, when there are people suffering out there?” Evidently, they are asking about the public value of higher education. But they are also asking old questions, some of the oldest that human beings have seen fit to ask. Versions of these questions appear in all scriptural traditions, in ancient and modern philosophical works, in stories and novels and songs. They are questions at the core of what we call “the humanities.” Part of why we study the humanities – and why we must – is to get help in asking, articulating, and trying to answer such questions. There aren’t single right answers to any of those questions. Each of us must work answers out for ourselves. But we can work out better answers for ourselves if we spend time in the company of others who take those questions seriously. This is not just an individual task; it’s a collective task of great public import. In this short piece, I defend the idea of the public humanities on these terms.

Public humanities happens whenever humanities scholarship interacts with public life. Providing a 10-point typology of public humanities, this article explains why we need the humanities – as individuals and as societies – and narrates some moments when the humanities have changed the world. We discuss the rise of “public humanities,” some critiques of the field, and a vision for its future.

A decade ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published The Heart of the Matter report to much acclaim. But what has been the impact of such a high-minded report? In the decade since its publication, we have seen a prevailing anti-humanities rhetoric with significant consequences to the security and persistence of humanistic principles. This article focuses on what many consider to be the most crucial problem of our time, climate change and its consequences, in thinking about how this overwhelming problem offers a rallying point for the insertion of the humanities into practical solutions which require an upending of discrete disciplinary perspectives as well as a bridging of the academic and public divide so that any space between the practice of the humanities and advocacy for social and environmental justice is vastly diminished. It argues for a thorough review of academic reward systems, for a broadening of scholarly definitions, and for a pedagogical focus that demands theory commit to empirical application. Finally, it suggests that we reengage our storytelling prowess with an emphasis on the power of metaphor in order to bolster imaginative response and methodological flexibility that is both cogent and compelling.

Graduate career development has grown over recent years with increasing interest in public scholarship and career diversity. In interviews with 41 public humanities leaders, participants agreed that public humanities introduces students to various career opportunities through community-engaged work and allows them to develop skills needed for those careers, such as event planning and fundraising. Some participants also noted that career diversity is becoming an important area of public humanities leadership roles. However, participants shared that faculty have not been formally prepared for their public humanities roles, and, in turn, faculty have not been prepared to teach graduate students for public humanities or career diversity. How do faculty prepare students for opportunities when they do not feel prepared for those same opportunities? This piece offers answers to that question.

This essay brings Black Studies, now commonly referred to as Africana Studies, further into the public humanities dialogue. Scholars in the public humanities field are urging a practice of humanities that is collaborative and committed to racial and social justice, especially in the context of community-based scholarship. The origin and current protocols of Black Studies are also community-centric and operate within a liberatory framework in that it is ultimately concerned with the vitality of Black people across the diaspora. The essay describes the correlation between Black Studies and public humanities and discusses the usefulness of both disciplines in reckoning with slavery and its legacies at higher education institutions. In addition to giving a short genealogy of public humanities and Black Studies, the essay uses William & Mary’s Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and Chesapeake Heartland: An African American at African American Humanities Project at Washington College as examples on how to possibly navigate the challenges ahead as public humanists and Black Studies scholars critically engage with the public on memorialization, reconciliation, and redress.