Here, we describe the creation of a new program, Public and Applied Liberal Arts, at a regional public university in the Midwest. We discuss the values of transdisciplinary research and teaching for the public good, and how we put together a willing group of faculty from across the university to create a new kind of academic program that moves the humanities into our communities and beyond.

What do students of the humanities know, and how do they come to know it? What can they do with that knowledge and skill? Students struggle to answer such questions because they cannot name what they know or can do in the “real” world. Exploring the teaching of the humanities as a form of public practice, this piece focuses on how knowledge is created and transferred in the humanities as part of an initiative called The Being Human Project. This project helps students “name” what they are learning through a set of humanities threshold concepts called SEAM: Storytelling, Empathy, Ambiguity, and Memory. Defining knowledge transfer in terms of recognition, recurrence, and application, students learn to use SEAM as a recombinant palette of problem-solving tools in the public sphere. If we imagine the humanities as a figurative sky filled with stars, the question is how best to prepare our students to navigate that vaunted space as the humanities “constellate” with public problems and practices. How can we help students recognize the value and instrumentality of what they are learning when such knowledge appears more like far-flung points of light than an array of constellations they might steer by?

In the spring of 2024, I taught an Introduction to Public Humanities course at Yale University, with the support of a teaching fellow. My primary aim was to expand student understanding of how the humanities could be practiced beyond the walls of the university for a wider public. However, to accomplish this goal, we first needed to situate the more abstract concepts of the “public” and the “humanities” historically and conceptually. This stimulated us to divide the course into three parts. The first, The Humanities and Publics in Context, focused on the history of the humanities within the broader American discourse. The second part, Humanities in Public Life, brought guest speakers from various areas of the program’s concentrations: Place and Space, History and the Public, Museums and Collections, Public Writing, Documentary Studies, Arts Research, and Digital Humanities. Finally, the third part, Public Humanities: Making It as We Do It, provided students the opportunity to engage directly with the public humanities through hands-on projects, allowing them to put their learning into action. This paper captures the lessons we learned, the challenges we encountered, and the work we created throughout the course. My hope in sharing this process is that it can serve as a useful resource for others looking to explore or develop their own public humanities projects.

This article reflects on the meaning of “public humanities” from the perspective of research and teaching in South Africa today. I reference the ways in which people have remembered the recently deceased Professor Eddie Webster (my first sociology professor) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and how he himself saw his critically engaged public work in the trade union movement and globally during both Apartheid and the post-Apartheid democratic government. In particular, I explore how his unique form of public humanities inspired his former students to be socially engaged citizens as they entered a diverse range of occupations and careers. I draw on Michael Burawoy’s depiction of the Webster windmill (public engagement, principled intervention, social justice and radical reform, expanding research programmes with a sociology of the south, and institution building) to suggest what public humanities means in the context of research and teaching. I draw on tributes from colleagues and former students – not to focus on Prof Webster’s significant academic and political work but to distil what it was about his teaching and critical engagement that suggests he is an exemplar of what is meant by public humanities.

This article provides a retrospective on the formation of the Engaged Humanities Lab at Royal Holloway, University of London. It sets the lab’s development within the broader history of labs in the humanities, setting out how the Engaged Humanities Lab aligns closely with Pawlicka-Deger’s description of “infrastructure of engagement” rather than the physical spaces that characterise science laboratories. We also explain why the sub-category of “engaged” humanities was selected over the broader and more established “public” humanities. The second half of the article provides reflections on the activities and achievements of the Engaged Humanities Lab, focusing on how intra-institution collaboration between an academic school and the Research and Innovation Department supported the formation and governance of the lab, allowing for ongoing dialogue and co-creation between subject area experts and research management professionals with expertise in research funding, policy, and knowledge exchange. This article also illuminates what is needed from university leaders to ensure the success and longevity of infrastructures of engagement like the Engaged Humanities Lab.

The hierarchical structures in which museums and galleries currently operate prohibit these cultural institutions from creating equitable and sustainable relationships with local residents. As a result, museums remain inaccessible civic spaces for many citizens in the United Kingdom and internationally. Reflecting on a case study based at the Whitworth Art Gallery, this article tests a practical tool that may be used to reimagine these hierarchies using asset-based community development (ABCD). It proposes the value of the ABCD technique, the Citizen Power Ladder, in supporting museums and galleries to become more citizen-led spaces that can be owned and used by all.

In the late 1950s, the Minnesota Department of Transportation used eminent domain to clear the path for I-94, displacing over 700 families and 300 businesses in Rondo, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. In the 2010s, Rondo residents and faculty at Macalester College teamed up to create Remembering Rondo, a digital public history project that included (among other things) a community-based archive and map of the neighborhood’s historic businesses from 1920 to 1960. Rondo Avenue, Inc., the neighborhood’s community council, asked to host the project themselves. Then in 2020, they forgot to renew the domain. The site went dark. This essay explores where we went wrong and what we can do about it, and raises questions about how we can reimagine digital sustainability through the lens of a shared authority.

This article offers practical advice on how to encourage our own students to deliver dynamic presentations to local high school students as their final course projects. Based on years of experience teaching “The Holocaust in American Literature,” I offer specific suggestions on how “traveling teaching” can accomplish memorable moments for our students and high school students alike, thereby providing examples of how a new national initiative that cements a closer relationship between higher education and K-12 schools might proceed.

This article reflects on the 2024 public humanities project “Susannah Darwin at The Mount: Hidden Maternal Histories,” held at Charles Darwin’s family home in Shrewsbury, England. Focusing on Katy Alston’s Mapping Susannah Darwin, a co-produced creative map stemming from the project that shows The Mount from the perspective of Darwin’s mother, Susannah, I reframe the fixed project “output” as the product of much more fluid sets of relationships and circumstances. This article blends personal reflection with insights from critical cartography, concepts of the object “life cycle,” and my underpinning research on the Darwin family and home. I aim to provide an accessible but critically informed account of the practices, relationships, serendipities, and setbacks that can characterise the humanities in action.

I was the inaugural Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) at UC San Diego from 2016 to 2019. The job entailed running 16 undergraduate programs, but that was only half of the gig. I was also charged with creating a hub for public arts and humanities. It was exciting, but daunting. It was a chance to cultivate meaningful exchange between the University and greater San Diego, but I was not well-versed in engaging public audiences or collaborating beyond academic circles. Against the backdrop of Trump’s rise to power, my first move was to announce two public forums: Challenging Conversations, and Community Arts and Resistance. Despite my steep learning curve in doing public events, IAH came to prioritize empathy, togetherness, and social justice storytelling. Our success was measured not simply in the number of events or audience members (those mattered, to be sure!), but in community building that grew from such work. It was less about one-off events than sustained conversation with our campus and surrounding communities. The work was collaborative and political. It rested on bringing communities and institutions together, pushing beyond the University’s gates, blending arts with humanities, being adaptable, and embracing the possible.

Since 2013, Poetry in America has evolved as an educational initiative from large, open-enrollment online courses, to a TV series, and a suite of educational programs supporting learners from middle school to adulthood, dual enrollment high school students pursuing college credit, current classroom teachers, and teachers in training. Contextualizing the form and methods of Poetry in America courses in relation to the schoolroom poetry of the past, and critical debates in literary studies about poetry in public, the author suggests that a schoolroom poetry for the present can prepare students to interpret any complex text, while also nurturing creativity, and recentering classrooms, wherever or whatever they are, as essential to civic life.

It is possible to communicate academic thought without being reductive, but that rarely happens in U.S. news media. Instead, academia is mined to produce journalistic edutainment: a media product that turns information into entertainment. Edutainment is pervasive, particularly in U.S. public radio and podcasting, the medium in which the authors work. A major reason edutainment dominates audio is that it is difficult to convey complex ideas in sound. Listeners, unlike readers, cannot control the speed at which they engage with material, which puts them at constant risk of getting lost. In U.S. public radio, the default solution is to make information entertaining. This approach has encouraged strict rules about everything from the length of stories and use of sound to the tone of narration and narrative structure. These rules all but ensure the production of edutainment. It does not have to be this way. Audio can be a powerful medium for academic work. To succeed, one must not pander but instead challenge the rules and explore new formats that honor the complexity of academic work. This is the story of our attempt to do just that with a new audio show, Ways of Knowing.

This article shares a unique form of public humanities created with an ethical community partnership between a university team, a community nonprofit organization, and a museum. Our podcast focuses on the stories of the staff of an organization that is affiliated with the International Rescue Committee and that resettles refugees, asylees, and immigrants. Most of the staff were immigrants themselves and shared their experiences as both outsiders and insiders in the communities that they serve. Given this historical moment of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, we aim for this podcast to serve for conversation and education about immigration not only in our local area but also in similar small cities and towns. Our podcast takes place in an upstate region of New York, approximately 200 miles outside of the city. We share our experience of putting into practice the methods and concepts drawn from public humanities, critical community engagement, ethnic studies, digital humanities, and podcast studies.

The city of Indore in Madhya Pradesh, India, is home to over 1 million individuals with disabilities. Despite this significant population, the public schools serving these communities often lack visibility and a dependable online presence. Information about these institutions is usually dispersed through unreliable channels, leaving the pedagogies and amenities primarily misunderstood. This article discusses the ideation, development, and completion of a public humanities initiative, “‘Only Connect!’ Empowering Public Schools for the Disabled in Indore to engage in a participatory and inclusive online public sphere,” a U.S. Alumni micro-grants project initiated and finalized in 2022. Only Connect! is a pioneering online platform that offers verified contact details for all public schools in Indore, catering to children who are Deaf, Blind, and those who suffer from speech difficulties between the ages of 6 and 18. The project’s central mission is to dispel the myths and inaccuracies surrounding disability education. Based on the narratives sourced from comprehensive fieldwork, surveys, and extensive interviews with key stakeholders, including school principals and parents, Only Connect! aims to foster a better-informed and supportive community. The goal of this project is to facilitate dialogue about the challenges and opportunities in educating disabled students in Indore, promoting greater understanding and inclusivity.

In 2023, Little Central America, 1984: A Sanctuary Then and Now by Elia Arce and Rubén Martínez premiered in Washington, DC. The play illuminates a historical moment known as the Sanctuary Movement, whereby religious institutions, nonprofit organizations, activists, and everyday people sought to create a safe place for Central Americans fleeing state-sponsored and state-condoned violence. The play was a community-based production, relying on local Latinxs—namely, Central Americans—and African Americans to bring it to life. Little Central America demonstrated how community-based theatre could (re)create sanctuary, challenge racial ideologies about Central Americans and Latinxs, and value diverse Central American lives on and off stage. Drawing on my experiences as a field producer, I examine how community-based theatre is a useful tool for Central American and Latinx communities. Ultimately, I argue that community-based theatre is necessary for enacting, processing, and understanding Central Americans’ converging and diverging pasts, presents, and futures.

This is a reflection on the experience of carrying out an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded public humanities project during the pandemic, focusing on one pathway to impact – a collaboration with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books – as a case study. I want to explore how we adapted these programmes in the light of global and personal circumstances and embraced digital media in unexpected ways. Looking back on what we accomplished, I now believe that, despite considerable challenges, we ended up with outcomes that were even richer and more rewarding precisely because of the challenges we faced and the unexpected paths that the project took us down. The second voice in this article is that of Charlotte Lancaster. Through her role as a Postdoctoral Impact Fellow at Bath Spa University, she worked to evidence the wider public impact of the “Into the Forest” project retrospectively. Here, she evaluates the impact of the project with Seven Stories and offers a coalescent voice to the argument underlining this article: that we need more realistic and flexible approaches to research planning, funding, and evaluation.

This essay uses the history of Cossitt Library—from its founding in 1893 to its renovation and reopening in 2023—to explore how the Southern public library has faced, and continues to face, unique opportunities and challenges for public humanities projects. As a scholar-in-residence at Cossitt from 2020 to 2022, I worked alongside the branch manager, staff librarians, community outreach specialists, local arts organizations, and special collections managers to document the history of Cossitt’s role in the city’s civic life and to create policies and programming that encouraged many different constituencies to see the space as their own. It offers an example of where the qualitative research skills of a humanities scholar can impact both large-scale and targeted public humanities projects.

Since 2017, St. Catherine University has partnered with the Mapping Prejudice Project to build an interdisciplinary and community-engaged public humanities project that can serve as a model for other universities. The project, titled Welcoming the Dear Neighbor?, engages students, faculty, and staff across departments who work in collaboration with community partners to advance knowledge of systemic racism and its impact both historically and in present-day disparities. The result is mutually beneficial relationships that integrate high-impact practices for student success and retention and yield tangible resources for community groups in our city and surrounding suburbs. To date, more than 1,400 students have participated in the project. We report qualitative and quantitative evidence showing that the project enhanced students’ sense of place and enriched their learning. We describe challenges and lessons learned that will be of particular interest to universities interested in projects that undertake interdisciplinary, racial justice-focused public humanities work.

How might we learn from history in ways that help us imagine a better future? And what role might academic institutions play in making those futures imaginable? These questions informed Rosine Association 2.0, a socially engaged art project out of Swarthmore College active from 2021 to 2023. Inspired by a nineteenth-century social project in Philadelphia, Rosine 2.0 formed an interdisciplinary collective of artists, harm reduction organizers, archivists, and activists to co-imagine how harm reduction and mutual aid reduce stigma and increase community care in Philadelphia. We believe that Rosine 2.0 exemplifies the possibilities of public humanities projects that are truly collaborative and transformative. The project went beyond interdisciplinarity by bringing together the fields of archiving, history, and community engagement with communities outside of the College, including curators, artists, and individuals with lived experience. While Swarthmore was the organizing institution, the project existed outside of traditional academic frameworks, creating alternative modes of relationality between and among campus and community members. Each contributed a vital set of skills and perspectives in a networked series of collaborations. The project allowed for rethinking relationships between past and present; between the college and community partners; as well as between faculty, staff, and students in the building of social structures of community care.