Public humanities is the work of engaging diverse publics in reflecting on heritage, traditions, and history, and the relevance of thehumanities to the current conditions of civic and cultural life.[1][2] Public humanities is usually practiced within federal, state,nonprofit and community-based cultural organizations that engage people in conversations, facilitate and present lectures, exhibitions, performances and other programs for the general public on topics such as history, philosophy, popular culture and the arts.[3][4] Public Humanities also exists within universities as a collaborative enterprise between communities and faculty, staff, and students.[5]
Public humanities projects include exhibitions and programming related to historic preservation, oral history, archives, material culture, public art, cultural heritage, and cultural policy.[6][7][8] TheNational Endowment for the Humanities notes that public humanities projects it has supported in the past include "interpretation at historic sites, television and radio productions, museum exhibitions, podcasts, short videos, digital games, websites, mobile apps, and other digital media."[9] Many practitioners of public humanities are invested in ensuring theaccessibility and relevance of the humanities to the general public orcommunity groups.[10]
The American Council of Learned Societies' National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities suggests that the nature of public humanities work is to teach the public the findings of academic scholarship: it sees "scholarship and the public humanities not as two distinct spheres but as parts of a single process, the process of taking private insight, testing it, and turning it into public knowledge."[11] Others, such as former museum director Nina Simon and Harvard professor Doris Sommer, suggest a more balanced understanding of the ways in which history, heritage, and culture are shared between the academy and the public.[12][13] These approaches draw on the notion ofshared historical authority.[14]
Several universities have established programs in the public humanities (or have otherwise expressed commitments to public humanities via the creation of centers, degrees, or certificate programs with investments in various forms of "public" work).[16] Programs include:
Georgetown University offers a stand-alone MA in the Engaged & Public Humanities as well as a Graduate Certificate program.[17]
Brown University'sJohn Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (JNBC) supported public humanities programs and offered a stand-alone MA in Public Humanities, a Certificate in Public Humanities for PhD students, and a transitional MA in Public Humanities for PhD students in American Studies.[18] In December 2023, the JNBC announced that the center would be renamed the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Studies and the MA program in Public Humanities was put on hold.[19] In the wake of this announcement, Brown's Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice began offering an MA in Integrative Studies "with a focus in public humanities."[20] The new program started in Fall 2024.
Carolina Public Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers extensive public outreach programs, a dedicated K12 teacher training subsidiary (Carolina K12), and a state-outreach program in partnership with the state's community colleges.
TheInstitute for Women Surfers is a grassroots educational initiative in the Public Humanities that brings together women surfers, activists, artists, business owners, scientists and educators, to create spaces of peer teaching, learning, and mutual aid.
University of Arizona established the Department of Public & Applied Humanities in 2017. As of 2024, their BA has eleven tracks: Business Administration; Consumer, Market & Retail Studies; Engineering Approaches; Environmental Systems; Fashion Studies; Game Studies; Medicine; Plant Studies; Public Health; Rural Leadership & Renewal; and Spatial Organization & Design Thinking.[30]
University of Maryland, Baltimore County has a Minor in Public Humanities. The Department of American Studies (AMST) hosts and supervises the minor in AMST’s Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture, in collaboration with the Dresher Center for the Humanities.[31]
University of Wisconsin–Madison has a public scholarship program, Public Humanities Exchange that supports collaborative work between humanities grad students and the community.[35]
Public Humanities work can take the form of written communication innews magazines as well as inacademic journals and books.
In 2024,Cambridge University Press launched an open-access international journal for the Public humanities which aims "to create a venue for sharing knowledge about the intersections of humanities scholarship and public life".[10]
^Julie Ellison, “The New Public Humanists,”PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): 289–98.
^Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt,Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice (Iowa City: University Of Iowa Press, 2019).
^Ned Kaufman,Place, Race, and Story : Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2009).
^Amy Lonetree,Decolonizing Museums : Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
^ab"Public Humanities". Retrieved2024-05-09. Public Humanities, Cambridge University Press
^Quay, James; Veninga, James (October 5–7, 1989).Making Connections: The Humanities, Culture and Community.National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities. Racine, Wisconsin: American Council of Learned Societies. Retrieved25 Jan 2016.We think it more useful and more accurate to consider scholarship and the public humanities not as two distinct spheres but as parts of a single process, the process of taking private insight, testing it, and turning it into public knowledge.
^Nina Simon,The Art of Relevance (Museum 2.0, 2016).
^Doris Sommer,The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
^Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, eds.,Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011).
