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.

I want to focus on three diverse examples of trickle-up innovation—Theatre of the Oppressed, ACT UP, and the Pro-Test Lab—with mentions of others to encourage more cultural-agent spotting. Artists are never simply victims of circumstance. Their agency sets off creative responses. To follow through from the call of social challenges to the responses of aesthetic innovation is to stimulate collective change.

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.

A leading scholar and institutional leader reflects on recent developments in her field, the public humanities, and the evolution of a research center for medieval and early modern studies.

I’ve argued... that [an interdisciplinary] future is imaginable if world-wide, education in the humanities—literature and philosophy, in other words—is, in a certain way, undertaken, and on all levels.

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.

In 2019 you began your service as Director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS), one of the most venerable centers of its kind. Now you are overseeing its transformation into the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies (CMRS-CEGS). What prompted the change? How did you...

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.

In “Rationality,” Charles Taylor defines reason in two ways: consistency, which is shared by all cultures; and theoretical reason, rationality.[1] For rationality, leading to “theoretical cultures” in the heritage of Plato, he has a higher claim and uses it to show that “one culture can surely lay...

How do we speak and write in a way that is concise and accessible to a wider audience and that can make an impact on social movements and on life in society?