Stanford Humanities Center
The Future of the Public Humanities
Is the future of the humanities a public one? In an era of challenges to history, philosophy, literature, and the other humanistic disciplines, utopian thinking about new outlets and broad audiences has become commonplace. Institutions of all sorts promote projects in the public humanities as an unequivocal gain for all, while reflection on the compromises of such projects—not to mention their hazards and omissions—is rarer, and sometimes difficult or unwelcome.
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From time to time, Arcade publishes interviews, essays, and other statements by figures on the front lines of humanistic teaching outside the United States and Western Europe. These statements consider the settings in which the humanities are being discovered by a new generation of students; they...
Sitting in the lobby of the Philadelphia Marriott at the 2023 annual convention of the American Historical Association, one would never know the guild had been rocked by a controversy that forced the AHA to temporarily suspend its Twitter account as AHA President James H. Sweet’s essay “Is History...
Debates have raged over whether the latest crisis of the humanities is rhetoric or reality. In either case, perceptions matter, and such perceptions have real consequences. So what should be done?
How should we use intellectual history to inform our thinking about freedom in the advent of digital technologies? Quentin Skinner argues that the prevalent liberal idiom is unable to address the political challenges in the world of big tech.
How could virtual reality be best used for public humanities? One immediate thought is that virtual reality would be an excellent tool for teaching history.
Today more than ever, we have to remember that the strict distinction between public and private still holds only in theory. It is not that the public and the private are hopelessly entangled; it is just that the public and the private bleed into each other. I am interested in how the non-scientist, the non-philosophers, the non-political scientists of the world can share the basic consistencies of a reasonable polity: the public sphere.
This book-length manifesto offers itself as both love song and lament. I interrogate research-creation as a genre full of exciting pedagogical and institutional possibility. I also lament the hopeless exhaustion I see in colleagues all around me. As a strategy of resistance to the resignation that surrounds me daily in the arts and humanities wings of the university, I look to research-creation, even as it is being commodified right under our feet, as a site of generative recrafting: a touchstone and orienting point that might help render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable.
I have been thinking of this essay as a road map to the ideas and practices of public humanities, a map that would help answer the title question, "why public humanities?" This essay will look at some beginning points for public humanities; work through definitions; talk about the stakes for faculty and students–and the universities and communities in which they work–and consider whether public humanities could be transformative rather than simply translational. No matter how you map public humanities, discussions of collaboration and social justice need to be at the center.
As feminists rise up and flood the streets in the years since Trump's election, the movement has simultaneously strengthened its own internal critique. Feminism has long been comprised of multiple streams in tension and often outright conflict. Drawing on nearly 200 years of feminist activism and writing, Kyla Schuller delineates the traditions of what has come to be called "white feminism" and "intersectional feminism"—revealing the liberatory potential of a feminism all too often forgotten, and the devastating limitations of the movement that has become iconic.
In this interview, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, Rey Chow reflects on the public (as well as environmental and digital) humanities and the current status of Michel Foucault's thought, among other topics.
This lecture draws on examples from English studies, medieval studies and the humanities, the three areas in which Lees conducts her work, to explore what the humanities in practice tell us about their potential at this critical juncture.
