Public humanities

Public humanities is the work of federal, state, nonprofit and community-based cultural organizations that engage the public in conversations, facilitate and present lectures, exhibitions, performances and other programs for the general public on topics such as history, philosophy, popular culture and the arts. Public humanities programs engage everyone in reflecting on diverse heritage, traditions, and history, and their relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of life.

Workers within the public humanities endeavor to create spaces where the public can engage in conversation, learning and reflection about issues and ideas. Public humanities projects include exhibitions and programming related to historic preservation, oral history, archives, material culture, public art, cultural heritage, and cultural policy. Practitioners of public humanities are invested in ensuring the accessibility and relevance of the humanities to the general public or community groups.

The American Council of Learned Societies' National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities suggests that the nature of public humanities work is to teach the public the findings of academic scholarship: it sees "scholarship and the public humanities not as two distinct spheres but as parts of a single process, the process of taking private insight, testing it, and turning it into public knowledge."^[1] Others suggest a more balanced understanding of the ways in which history, heritage and culture are shared between the academy and the public.

Several universities have established programs in the public humanities, including:

• Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK, whose newly created BA Sociology degree has deliberately been placed within a School of Humanities, and will be delivered by members of a research cluster wherein the idea of "public sociology" (i.e. a sociology that engages audiences beyond the academy in cultural, literary and sociology debate) is activeliy cultivated and fostered.
• Brown University, whose John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage supports public humanities programs and offers a masters degree in public humanities. Brown's public humanities program emphasizes practice, balanced with theory and a ground in a field of study.
• The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington offers a Certificate in Public Scholarship.
• Michigan State University, whose Public Humanities Collaborative "provides a gathering place, a commons, where faculty, students, and outreach professionals can collaborate with community groups to build strong campus-community partnerships and enhance public understanding of liberal arts for democracy."
• New York University, whose Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought "is one of the largest and best-known interdisciplinary graduate programs in the country."
• Portland State University, whose Portland Center for Public Humanities provides a yearlong forum of talks, roundtables, and workshops where the public can engage with humanistic questions, knowledge and debates.
• Rutgers University-Newark, whose Public Humanities track in the American Studies MA program "is designed to ground students in the history, theory and methods of the public humanities, and in a foundation in nonprofit management, and bring it all together with project-based courses, an internship and capstone, preparing students for careers in cultural and community institutions."
• University of Sheffield, UK The University of Sheffield, UK offers an *MA in Public Humanities] with pathways in Digital humanities, Public Engagement and Cultural Heritage.. The course combined modules taught by experts in their field with project work with external partners and dissertation research
• University of Western Ontario, where a new program called The Public Humanities @ Western "is "designed to enhance the Faculty of Arts and Humanities’ commitment to the promotion of innovative forms of publicly engaged knowledge creation, experiential learning, and campus-community collaboration."
• University of Wisconsin–Madison, whose Center for the Humanities is the primary vehicle on the campus for interdisciplinary work in the humanities, has a public scholarship program, Public Humanities Exchange that supports collaborative work between humanities grad students and the community.
• Yale University, whose MA program in Public Humanities is part of the American Studies Program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Related fields include public history, public sociology, public folklore, public anthropology, public philosophy, historic preservation, museum studies, cultural heritage management, community archaeology, public art, and public science.

Examples of some private/public institutions and organizations that implement public humanities programs are:

• Museums
• State and National Parks
• Cultural Organizations, such as community centers
• Libraries
• Archives
• Historic Sites
• Schools and universities
• Cultural Policy institutes
• Historic and Preservation Societies
• Public Art and Public History Projects
• Public Radio
• Community Building Initiatives
• State Humanities Councils

References

External links

• American Council of Learned Societies' National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• Public Humanities Program Brown University, Providence, RI