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.

If Shakespeare’s greatest characters quake to their very core with the realization of what they cannot see, or lose their reason altogether when they finally grasp how little they understood, Cervantes crafted an entirely new way of writing around his characters’ limitations and the incompatibility of their different perceptions of the world.