As Humanities Fight for Support, New Journal Aims to Celebrate Their Role in Public Life

Like air, humanities-driven work is everywhere but taken for granted, so much a part of life it’s easy to overlook.

A scholarly book or article about history or philosophy counts. So does a local oral-history project, an art exhibit, or a dinner-table conversation about books, movies, or music.

A new peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Public Humanities, aims to strengthen the connections between university-based humanities work and the wider world, creating a space for academics and practitioners 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, in spite of perennial laments about the crisis in the humanities, they’re very much alive, especially if you look beyond dismal stats about funding cuts, threatened departments and declining majors.

Published by Cambridge University Press, Public Humanities is pitched as a very large tent. The mission statement emphasizes inclusiveness, declaring the journal “a space for scholars, students, activists, journalists, policy-makers, professionals, practitioners, and non-specialists to connect and share knowledge.” It’s open to “all disciplines, geographies, periods, methodologies, authors, and audiences across the humanities.” 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 humans make—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, an assistant professor of liberal arts and natural sciences at the University of Birmingham, in an essay in the first issue. In fact, they point out that some people outside higher ed doing what they call public humanities may not even know or care about that word.

The editors plan to do five or six themed issues a year, as well as “Of the moment” essays on pressing social issues and how humanities work intersects with them. One such essay, written by Susan McWilliams Barndt, who teaches political science at Pomona College, takes up an existential question her students ask, especially these days: “Why study the humanities when people are dying?”

Upcoming themed 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” issue, which Wilson describes as “nuts and bolts” stories of handy public-facing humanities skills such as how to make a podcast.

One of the journal’s editors, Ricardo L. Ortiz, directs the MA in Engaged and Public Humanities Program at Georgetown University, where he’s a professor of Latinx literatures and cultures. He’s editing a forthcoming special issue on “The Public Humanities in Action.” The articles are undergoing peer review, so Ortiz can’t share more than general details, but he describes them as case studies that feature partnerships with historically marginalized and under-represented groups in the U.S. and elsewhere.

“They range from projects that engage the literary cultures of local communities, to ones that collaborate with public historical archives, to others that model alternative community-based pedagogies for students working with off-campus partner organizations,” he says. Although grounded in academic research, the projects focus more on how to collaborate with community partners than on pulling knowledge from them.

Avoiding ‘Myopic’ Thinking

That move away from an “extractive” model of humanities research resonates with Matthew Gibson. He’s the executive director of Virginia Humanities, which supports community-based public humanities projects across Virginia. (Almost all of the U.S. states and territories have a state humanities council.) Gibson isn’t involved in the new journal but welcomes its arrival.

“The more we can focus on the public humanities, both within and without the academy, the better off the humanities in general will be,” he says.

There’s too often been “myopic thinking within the academy that that’s where the humanities live and die,” Gibson argues. “And of course that’s not true at all. They’re infused in everything that we do, everything we become, and they carry with us into whatever career we decide to pursue.”

He’d like to see the journal add more non-academic editors to its advisory board, people “who are doing the work, who sit in the crossroads between policy, government advocacy, outreach to the public and engagement with the public and the academy.”

According to Bulaitis and Wilson, that’s the plan.

“While we’re starting with mostly academics in our community, since that is terra firma for a scholarly journal,” Wilson says, “we’ll be moving to an editorial collective and advisory board that features members from each of the ten types of public humanities” sketch out in their essay in The Manifesto Issue. That “typology,” as they call it, includes activism, pedagogy and the kind of knowledge acquired in hands-on humanities work in libraries and museums, journalism and public policy.

The editors also want the journal to be a safe working space for non-academics who have practical knowledge to share with the scholarly world but aren’t trained to write for a specialized audience. (The need to be able to translate between academic and public audiences applies both ways, as Devoney Looser, a professor of English at Arizona State University and an editor of the journal, points out in an essay on “The Necessity of Public Writing” included in the debut issue.)

There’s no shortage of extra-academic expertise waiting to be tapped.

Robert B. Townsend, program director for the arts, humanities and culture at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, serves on the journal’s editorial board. He’s also a longstanding analyst of humanities data, including what people do with those degrees. Humanists work in many fields, and in his experience, what counts as public humanities work in one country or setting doesn’t always count in another, in part because of how such work is funded. Public Humanities could be a gathering place to explore how those definitional differences “are perhaps creating barriers and challenges to good conversations that we might have elsewhere,” he says.

The journal aims to be geographically as well as conceptually broad. The editorial board includes many scholars who work at universities in the United States and the U.K. But it also draws from the global humanities community, with members based in Australia, Ghana, Hong Kong, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan, and elsewhere. There is a linguistic limit, though; the journal only runs articles in English.

The idea for Public Humanities came out of a roundtable on presentism, politics, and academia Wilson attended at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in 2018. He followed up with an article in the spring 2019 issue of the journal Profession in which he floated the idea of a journal. That led to a preliminary conversation with Cambridge University Press, but “I had given up hope that the journal would ever happen,” Wilson says, “until Zoe came along and that’s what ignited the project. Zoe was the one who assembled the team and turned an idea into a reality.”

Across the Atlantic, Bulaitis had been researching the changing value of higher education and the raising of tuition fees in the U.K. A Cambridge University colleague connected her with Wilson and the press. “Intellectually, we come from very different spheres,” he says. “I like all the old stuff, and Zoe is very current and of the moment.” (Compare the scholarly books they published in 2020: Wilson’s “Shakespeare and Trump” and Bulaitis’ “Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance.”)

Launching the journal via an established university press made sense on several fronts. “We were really determined to have a place that took these conversations into the heart of traditional academia,” Bulaitis says. “A lot of the work in the public humanities is often seen as an add-on to people’s careers,” she adds. “We disagreed with that notion, and we wanted to have it housed somewhere that would provide longevity, that would include archival processes and a real place for the public humanities” inside the academic world.

The variability of what counts as public humanities creates interesting points of departure 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 she directed from 2012-2022, has a strong emphasis on public humanities, so she welcomed the arrival of the journal as “a forum to talk to other people about it across the world.” Nuttall will peer review articles and help recruit other academics in the Global South to be editors, contributors and reviewers. (Early on she suggested they add an editor based in western Africa. 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 engage in public life follow a different script. “The outreach model, which has defined a lot of U.S. campus debates on this issue, assumes there’s a community out there to reach in the singular,” she says. In the multi-ethnic context of South Africa, there’s a sense that “there may be a problem with university intellectuals in a very unequal country reaching into that community in an uncomplicated way.” Instead, the emphasis has been on opening up the university to communities traditionally excluded from it.

Nuttall points to attempts to define the public humanities as part of the rise of critical university studies, which questions not only what a university is but whom it serves.

Academia “needs to be a little less pompous and inaccessible, and one way to do that is by putting itself in public,” she says. “How do you take really amazing academic research and turn it into social information, public knowledge? It’s an ongoing question that some academics find stressful.”

The new journal could be a place for humanists of all stripes to gather in search of answers.