Moreover, many scholars feel prompted not merely to join a public conversation but to inform and change it. Even so, they may encounter resistance from those who see them as isolated or privileged by knowledge.

In the months after this year’s Presidential Lecture by Tommie Shelby, which probed many aspects of these issues, we asked the members of the 2025-26 SHC cohort of Fellows to provide us with reflections answering this moment. Prompts we asked included: How do you conceive the relation of your intellectual work to the present moment? How does research in the humanities make a difference in society, in the broader culture, or over the longer term? And especially now, as we experience one crisis after another in the world, what brings you back to the practice of interpretation, argument, and analysis?

The responses, gathered in this Colloquy, range from the global to the hyperlocal, from ancient Greece to the twenty-first-century university campus, from California’s intertidal zones to warehouses in Georgia. While each of these pieces touches, at least in part, on some of the most harrowing aspects of our current moment, they also offer some glimmer of hope, whether it be a call to specific political or intellectual work on the part of scholars, an account of the activism that is already a core part of many scholarly pursuits, or simply a reminder that any individual scholar who chooses to use their work in this way is not alone.

This Colloquy aims to capture a tumultuous year in public life through the mirror of academic discourse as experienced across many fields and methods. Like all Colloquies, it invites conversation and contributions, and its work is never finished.