Painting of two Hindu supplicants (one has their hands folded in reverances and one is sitting in a yogic pose)
Crisis and Culture: The Public Role of a Critical Humanities

D. Venkat Rao urges for us to conceive the Critical Humanities as a necessary response to a prior humanities that has disavowed enlivened cultural memory. This idea of the Critical Humanities compels us to  think together across contextual borders in order to affirm the web of formations that sustains public engagement within the academic humanities. Rao suggests that universalisms ought to be negotiated through, rather than against, cultural differences and that Saidian frameworks of difference require revisions within non-Western institutions.

The Return of Ulysses
The Humanities in Practice

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.

Red light protrudes from gate
Humanities Futures

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?

intertextuality
Counterhistories of Feminism

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.

The Divers by Fernand Léger
Why Public Humanities?

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.

Divers on a Yellow Background by Fernand Léger
The Public Futures of the Humanities
The public humanities stand the best chance of showing the distinctive contribution that the humanities can make to all fields of knowledge by keeping alive values that are irreducible to both instrumentality and profitability. The public humanities not only shows what the humanities have to offer the public sphere, but how various publics are framing what the humanities do within the university.