Stanford Humanities Center
Data is an underutilized aspect of the public humanities. How do we harness digital datasets to expand the reach of the traditional public humanities? How can the digital humanities expand the reach of humanities scholarship?
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.
Yousuf Saeed, Co-founder and project director of Tasveer Ghar, and International Visiting Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, reflects on digitizing and archiving South Asian bazaar art, and the question of the intellectual property and community ownership of popular art at Tasveer Ghar.
In a conversation with our editor, Stephanie Kirk, director of the Washington University in St. Louis Center for the Humanities, discusses her efforts to support humanities students pursuing careers beyond academia.
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.
In a conversation with our editor, Professors Franz Fischer and Giovanna Ceserani reflect on their careers in the digital humanities and the various intersections between digital, public, and traditional humanities initiatives at the university and beyond.
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?
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.
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.
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.
