The phrase “much ado about nothing” in popular discourse attempts to dispel suspicion, including in response to high-profile sexual assault allegations such as those against Harvey Weinstein. This article explores how Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing speaks to this trend. In the play, Claudio falsely accuses Hero of infidelity, abandoning her at the altar. For this play to be a comedy with a “happy” ending, Claudio must admit that he was mistaken. He discovers that consent (or, in the play’s vocabulary, “good will”) is a relational agreement between two equals, not a mediated exchange of property. Claudio’s mistake, the subject of Beatrice and Benedick’s teasing, is inherent to Weinstein’s defense arguments and other usages. Much Ado About Nothing provides a model for reforming our cultural concept of consent.

It has long been acknowledged that the past can be a weapon. In Palestine, reports of the targeting of archaeological sites, museums, archives, and other locations of cultural heritage by Tel Aviv have been increasing drastically since 7 October 2023 (although they took place before). This article seeks to contextualise these destructions of heritage within a larger project of controlling history and understands this project to be a cornerstone of European colonialism, comparing it with Britain’s colonial control over how ancient sites are interpreted in what is now Zimbabwe. It asks what the role of the historian is in a time of genocide and revisits what it means to do “decolonial” work while history is being weaponised for colonial occupation. And it requires those of us who are interested in the past (and especially the ancient past) to reckon with our position in the belly of the beast.

It is often claimed that public history represents a democratisation of historical knowledge, but how is “the public” being imagined here? This short article provides a report from a collaborative, student–staff research project that investigated how key stakeholders involved in public history—students, academics, and heritage professionals—understood their publics. It reflects on two key themes that emerged from the testimonies: issues of inclusion and positionality. We analyse a selection of telling cases, situating these extracts in the context of financial pressures, neo-liberal marketisation and the politicisation of DEI agendas. We suggest that there is a need for more open, reflexive, and cross-disciplinary dialogue between different stakeholders about the various publics they construct and engage.

This brief piece addresses the dispute sparked by Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to two classes of people traditionally included under the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A primary goal is to provide a historical perspective on arguments made by both sides that are too frequently neglected in media coverage of the dispute. The piece does not predict how SCOTUS might rule, but it does make a case for the nation’s responsibility to children who have violated no law. Through textual and historical analysis, it also refutes two law professors who propose an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that supports Trump’s effort to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants. Drawing on works of literature, this article hopes to clarify the consequences of the complicated legal issues involved, including the bigoted history of previous efforts to restrict birthright citizenship.

This article argues that, as they are currently designed, UN climate talks fail to address the environmental catastrophe they aim to address. While dialogue is the primary means through which the world’s population can get together, discuss the scope and nature of the problem, and put appropriate measures into action, these talks are, year after year, employed as a way to create the illusion that democratic decision-making occurs. As a result, these kinds of events can only succeed in entrenching positions, exacerbating the impasse at which we currently find ourselves. This, in turn, solidifies the notion that we indeed need to engage in a dialogue about climate change, thus perpetuating a never-ending cycle that protects, under the veneer of planetary engagement, the continuation of capitalist business as usual. The article, therefore, proposes that a dialogic path to finding a solution to the climate catastrophe can only be successful if climate talks are rethought, placing at the helm voices from the most affected populations in the Global South. Otherwise, these talks will continue to fail in making a significant change that ensures the possibility of an environmentally just and viable future for the planet.

This article connects infrastructural violence to environmental injustice in the South Durban Basin, the industrial hub of the Durban metropolis in South Africa, where escalating ecological difficulties have negatively impacted living standards. The combination of the racially insensitive apartheid regime in South Africa and the harmful effects of toxicity requires a decolonial repair perspective founded on egalitarian dialogue and the inclusion of affected viewpoints and participation. In advocating for this repair framework, this article calls for horizontal discussions that thoroughly examine these issues, which can subsequently facilitate equitable environmental policies, regulations, and laws.

This article presents a short selective history of contemporary collecting at the Smithsonian Institution. I explain what contemporary collecting is and show how contemporary collecting in the 1960s and 1970s produced histories of political reform movements and participatory democracy. I argue that many material records would not exist today if it had not been for a small group of committed curators who pioneered this practice in the absence of policy guardrails—and often despite a lack of institutional support. I present a brief overview of contemporary collecting methods and outcomes to argue that it is more important than ever for us to collect evidence of diverse political activity in our current moment—a moment in which cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, are being attacked by executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, despite their long-standing reputation for maintaining truth and public trust in times of political change and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting how people can approach this work today.

In early January 2025, wildfires swept through several regions of Los Angeles, California. The fires’ proximity to Hollywood, the epicentre of Western visual and cinematic production, led to the creation and wide circulation of real and artificially generated images on social media. In this article, I argue two things: first, these images capture human concerns in the age of polycrisis; and second, by interpreting these images as symptoms of an attempt to articulate a sense of reality in which human imagination has itself become under threat, public humanists of the present and future need to be attuned to their role as mediators of diverse publics and their way of making sense under these crisis conditions. This article thus uses selected imagery of Los Angeles’s wildfires circulating on social media to excavate how ways of meaning-making in a digital age (memeification, use of generative artificial intelligence) reflect real public concerns about polycrisis, rendering these images productive beyond their satirical or misinforming values.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong is launching a pioneering BA program in Public Humanities, combining two existing units—Cultural Studies and Cultural Management—to form a socially relevant undergraduate education that promotes community-building, critical and creative skills, and humanities values. Hong Kong’s public sphere has been shrinking, necessitating a deeper reflection and conceptualization of the public within its historical and cultural contexts. The term “public” in Hong Kong has diverse meanings and overlaps with private and communal aspects, influenced by Chinese cultural history and colonial experiences. Despite the decline of civil society, various public activities, such as markets, performances, and talks, continue to foster local culture and community engagement in Hong Kong. The program emphasizes collaboration, participatory arts, and media technology to foster civic agency and public engagement, encouraging students to work with diverse community stakeholders. The program promotes care and connection as guiding principles for community-building, aiming to cultivate responsible citizens and rebuild trust through open communication and meaningful civic participation.

This article contends that philosophy is losing its standing because of its tendency to treat its own practice as an exercise in thinking about the world. When we treat ourselves and our colleagues as thinkers of the world, we isolate both our research and each other from the world. This is affecting the way philosophers and their work are perceived by others, and subsequently, if and how they are received as contributors to public discourse. One potential solution is to acknowledge that philosophy matters in the material sense: we must return to our bodies as (1) sites of meaning-making and discovery and (2) the condition that ensures philosophical practice remains a worldly activity. We make philosophy matter by making our research matter and each other matter.

Frankfurt School Critical Theory emerged to challenge systems of oppression, but it carries a fatal flaw: it’s stuck in the Enlightenment mindset that birthed colonialism. It talks about freedom – but only from a Eurocentric lens, ignoring the wisdom of the Global South. Enter Neo-Vedanta, a revolutionary reinterpretation of ancient Indian philosophy, propelled by Swami Vivekananda’s call for a spiritual and social awakening. While Critical Theory exposes power structures, Neo-Vedanta goes deeper, arguing that real freedom starts within. It dismantles the ego – the root of domination – and replaces it with seva, selfless service. For Vivekananda, liberation wasn’t about personal enlightenment or Western-style progress; it was about merging the self with humanity’s collective struggle. This isn’t about picking sides – it’s about creating something new: a world where liberation isn’t a Western export but a global conversation. True freedom, Neo-Vedanta reminds us, isn’t just about breaking chains. It’s about dissolving the very idea of control – and finding power in service, not domination. Liberation was never meant to belong to one civilization alone.

When the European Union was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2012, the citation stated that military conflict on the continent was “virtually inconceivable” owing to its action. This article will examine what role its acts and omissions played in the origins of the Ukraine crisis. The tensions stoked by potential NATO membership have been well aired. However, this article will argue that the treatment of minorities and particularly of the Russian language was equally important. The EU’s failure to address these questions by insisting Kjiv grant substantial linguistic rights, or even regional autonomy as foreseen by the second Minsk agreement, was a significant cause of the conflict.

Students undertaking a close reading and scholars studying the practice ask the same question: What exactly is “close reading”? While we now associate the phrase with literary critics of the 1930s–1950s, they themselves infrequently invoked it as a term of art. Since then, scholars have struggled to define close reading beyond the vague notion of reading with “attention to the words on the page.” While compiling the bibliography for John Guillory’s book On Close Reading, I created a free online archive, which gathers over 2,500 statements on the practice: www.closereadingarchive.org. In harvesting key quotations from this archive, this cento adheres to Edward Said’s insight: “single phrases” can “contain a whole library of meanings.” What follows is not an explicit argument so much as a roadmap of distilled claims about the topic, with each successive entry sometimes recalling previous ones, or introducing new turns of the subject – all offering provocations to further thought. Whether from critics well known or lesser known, to poets who have commented on the subject, to government reports and school catalogs, the items cumulatively corroborate that close reading has persisted as the heart of the critical enterprise. I hope, of course, that these excerpts entice readers to survey the online archive and thereby assemble their own alternative accounts.

My maternal grandparents were from Warsaw. On one side, only my grandmother survived the Holocaust; on the other, my grandfather and his two brothers escaped together. My sense of family always included those who were lost to genocide. The absence has always been at least as visible as the presence. Ghosts. Shadows. Still images in stories. I knew they were there. Somehow. Somewhere. As of October 2024, these ghosts have a home, a place in the city, in their city of Warsaw, Poland. This was the last place they resided of their own free will. Their names are etched in brass, planted in concrete – stumbling stones or Stolpersteine, to be exact – to remind passersby of the last place they lived by choice in Warsaw. This public humanities/public art project reveals a lot about memory, monument, and meaning in a much-contested arena – the history of Jews in Poland.

This article draws a comparison between US border policies in the 2020s and the policies implemented by the British colonial regime in 1940s ‘Aden to dissuade Jewish immigration. It makes an original argument, based on documents from the British colonial archives and Jewish philanthropic sources, that the plunder of Jewish migrants was a consequence of British policy, and not, as scholars have sometimes assumed, a vaguely-defined “anarchy” in the Aden Protectorate sultanates (today, southern, and eastern Yemen). The history of British immigration policy – and the unofficial incorporation of both environmental and human forces into the project of dissuading Jewish migration – bears a striking resemblance to American policies in recent years. The perils of the Darién Gap and other deadly routes and the concentration of migrants in dangerous conditions on the US–Mexico border de facto incorporate the jungle, the desert, and criminal syndicates into the border regime’s efforts to disincentivize migration. A look at the archival record of a parallel story in 1940s Yemen/‘Aden allows us to glimpse the construction of policies that utilize unofficial actors and factors (from bandits to the hot desert sun) in a border regime’s campaign of terror against (potential) migrants. The article demonstrates the value of historical comparative cases for understanding the policies of governments today. Scholars of current events lack access to the intelligence reports, correspondence, and other once-classified documents available to historians, which allow for a fuller understanding of the ways in which similar policies have been developed and implemented.

This article takes a worm’s eye view of the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts and comments on the political realities that inform their operations. My work as a scholar and an applied theater practitioner with Aquila Theatre received program support from both agencies and has represented them at the White House, US Capitol, and US Supreme Court. I suggest that the traditional division that exists between arts and humanities, as reflected in the policies of both endowments, should be erased for the betterment of public-facing humanities, and, as a humanities program director, I want to address the structural problems of fundraising and the politics of money that inform the granting decisions of these US federal agencies.

The idea of a “public humanities” reflects a specific understanding not only of the humanities as a field of interest or set of disciplines but also of citizens’ needs in a democracy. This understanding was most fully articulated in the United States, where it informed the national understanding of the goals of education that emerged in the aftermath of WWII. What distinguishes the American conception of the humanities from other systems is the place of privilege accorded the activities of interpretation and judgment, and the conviction that these were most effectively inculcated through the study of literature.

Each year, I brace for National Hispanic Heritage Month, the intensely rich and active national holiday that takes months to plan, weeks to execute, and days from which to recover. With community partners, we often discuss how to best make use of this public holiday to spotlight our most pressing needs. As an educator, I use this public holiday to show students and colleagues, who are ever-more concerned about curricular alignment with workforce needs, about the importance of my mother tongue and its superpower to bridge communication in our multilingual nation. In the United States, more than 40 million people speak Spanish as their first language and there are more than 50 million speakers of Spanish. We can use this national public holiday to unearth and commemorate more widely – and loudly – that Spanish is also an American language. However, we might also realize that honoring our national Hispanic heritage needs more than one month.

“Caste No Bar?” navigates through Kolkata’s upper-caste Hindu Bengali matrimonial landscape and probes the patterns of matchmaking among families seeking brides for NRI (non-resident Indian) grooms. The matrimonial market, I argue, neatly foregrounds everyday casteism. If the parent community in West Bengal harbours a distinguished obsession with caste, the Bengali diaspora transports such caste enthusiasm beyond geographical confines to reproduce and reinforce caste on a global terrain. The apparent liberal progressive image of educated Bengali families with well-educated NRI grooms is grossly denuded in the matrimonial market. Across matrimonial columns and matrimonial websites, most advertisements mention their own caste affiliations; some stipulate preferred caste affiliations of the desired spouse, while many declare “Caste No Bar,” an oft-adduced phrase which adequately disguises the caste-fervour underlining Kolkata’s matrimonial market. Foregrounding the permeating social acceptability of endogamous marriages, this article scouts for the subtext of “Caste No Bar” that permits selective exogamy and precludes most boundary-crossings in a caste-charged matrimonial landscape that tellingly underpins caste bigotry.

Poet Nikki Giovanni’s death rocked scholarly and literary communities. The occasion of her 9 December 2024 death has prompted reflections on the life and legacy across genres and decades. As others write and talk about Giovanni from a purely “scholarly” angle analyzing her body of work, I offer here a glimpse into Nikki Giovanni the person who loved Black people and who welcomed me into her life and friend circle. I punctuate my essay with references to her poetry but mostly underscore her generosity, compassion, and human kindness infused into her creative expressions. Nikki was a poet’s poet beloved by many. Those who leaned into her wit, her unadulterated truth-telling about US racism, Black love, and Black self-love found in her life and work a refuge from worlds that deny, erase, and devalue. She elevated and amplified Black people and Black women specifically and humanity more broadly.