This article provides a retrospective on the formation of the Engaged Humanities Lab at Royal Holloway, University of London. It sets the lab’s development within the broader history of labs in the humanities, setting out how the Engaged Humanities Lab aligns closely with Pawlicka-Deger’s description of “infrastructure of engagement” rather than the physical spaces that characterise science laboratories. We also explain why the sub-category of “engaged” humanities was selected over the broader and more established “public” humanities. The second half of the article provides reflections on the activities and achievements of the Engaged Humanities Lab, focusing on how intra-institution collaboration between an academic school and the Research and Innovation Department supported the formation and governance of the lab, allowing for ongoing dialogue and co-creation between subject area experts and research management professionals with expertise in research funding, policy, and knowledge exchange. This article also illuminates what is needed from university leaders to ensure the success and longevity of infrastructures of engagement like the Engaged Humanities Lab.

In the late 1950s, the Minnesota Department of Transportation used eminent domain to clear the path for I-94, displacing over 700 families and 300 businesses in Rondo, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. In the 2010s, Rondo residents and faculty at Macalester College teamed up to create Remembering Rondo, a digital public history project that included (among other things) a community-based archive and map of the neighborhood’s historic businesses from 1920 to 1960. Rondo Avenue, Inc., the neighborhood’s community council, asked to host the project themselves. Then in 2020, they forgot to renew the domain. The site went dark. This essay explores where we went wrong and what we can do about it, and raises questions about how we can reimagine digital sustainability through the lens of a shared authority.

This essay demonstrates the impact of careful, intentional event design on public humanities programming. In particular, it records the practical and pedagogical methodologies we have developed through a decade of sustained collaboration between a humanities scholar and an arts administrator. We outline the ways that arts administration practices have informed our approach to public humanities, and we suggest that these practices can help us to address skills gaps in graduate training in the humanities. In the essay, we walk through our framework for the intentional design of a public humanities event (the Life Cycle of an Event worksheet) and offer practical advice on further collaboration between humanities practitioners and arts administrators. We have found that when humanities practitioners and arts administrators collaborate, accessibility and inclusivity become central to public humanities program design – an achievable expectation and not just an aspiration. Above all, our collaboration has deepened our commitment to curating relevant public humanities programming that welcomes community members and provides mentorship opportunities for students.

Students undertaking a close reading and scholars studying the practice ask the same question: What exactly is “close reading”? While we now associate the phrase with literary critics of the 1930s–1950s, they themselves infrequently invoked it as a term of art. Since then, scholars have struggled to define close reading beyond the vague notion of reading with “attention to the words on the page.” While compiling the bibliography for John Guillory’s book On Close Reading, I created a free online archive, which gathers over 2,500 statements on the practice: www.closereadingarchive.org. In harvesting key quotations from this archive, this cento adheres to Edward Said’s insight: “single phrases” can “contain a whole library of meanings.” What follows is not an explicit argument so much as a roadmap of distilled claims about the topic, with each successive entry sometimes recalling previous ones, or introducing new turns of the subject – all offering provocations to further thought. Whether from critics well known or lesser known, to poets who have commented on the subject, to government reports and school catalogs, the items cumulatively corroborate that close reading has persisted as the heart of the critical enterprise. I hope, of course, that these excerpts entice readers to survey the online archive and thereby assemble their own alternative accounts.

A former academic director and instructor in the Clemente Course in Humanities outlines the arc of this National Humanities Medal-winning program, and the arc of a career with it, discussing key elements involving academic and curricular matters, community partnerships, event planning, faculty and student recruitment, fiscal support, and public engagement extending across various institutions and organizations. Reflections on the value of adult education programs in the context of humanistic inquiry occasion further accounts and assertions about the nature of the public humanities, engaging publics not conceived in the abstract, in general, or for research purposes, but as they are configured and manifested among one’s fellow citizens, at particular times and in particular places.

This article considers the role of the public humanities in fostering conversations about climate science and policy through a transdisciplinary performance at the University at Buffalo in New York. The Great Lakes Climate Theatre Initiative is a new project that brings together sustainability scientists with theater practitioners to create new and mixed methods for climate preparedness that are both inclusive and impactful. Toward a Climate Haven was the first project conducted by the initiative with the goal of exploring how Buffalo might become a safe and equitable destination for climate migrants. This first project resulted in a public event that combined the performance of a newly-commissioned play, a talkback session, readings from a local youth writing workshop, and a presentation from a local county official. In this article, our team reflects on how we brought these various threads together to leverage the public humanities in the effort to prepare for climate change.

This article offers practical advice on how to encourage our own students to deliver dynamic presentations to local high school students as their final course projects. Based on years of experience teaching “The Holocaust in American Literature,” I offer specific suggestions on how “traveling teaching” can accomplish memorable moments for our students and high school students alike, thereby providing examples of how a new national initiative that cements a closer relationship between higher education and K-12 schools might proceed.

This article reflects on the 2024 public humanities project “Susannah Darwin at The Mount: Hidden Maternal Histories,” held at Charles Darwin’s family home in Shrewsbury, England. Focusing on Katy Alston’s Mapping Susannah Darwin, a co-produced creative map stemming from the project that shows The Mount from the perspective of Darwin’s mother, Susannah, I reframe the fixed project “output” as the product of much more fluid sets of relationships and circumstances. This article blends personal reflection with insights from critical cartography, concepts of the object “life cycle,” and my underpinning research on the Darwin family and home. I aim to provide an accessible but critically informed account of the practices, relationships, serendipities, and setbacks that can characterise the humanities in action.

I was the inaugural Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) at UC San Diego from 2016 to 2019. The job entailed running 16 undergraduate programs, but that was only half of the gig. I was also charged with creating a hub for public arts and humanities. It was exciting, but daunting. It was a chance to cultivate meaningful exchange between the University and greater San Diego, but I was not well-versed in engaging public audiences or collaborating beyond academic circles. Against the backdrop of Trump’s rise to power, my first move was to announce two public forums: Challenging Conversations, and Community Arts and Resistance. Despite my steep learning curve in doing public events, IAH came to prioritize empathy, togetherness, and social justice storytelling. Our success was measured not simply in the number of events or audience members (those mattered, to be sure!), but in community building that grew from such work. It was less about one-off events than sustained conversation with our campus and surrounding communities. The work was collaborative and political. It rested on bringing communities and institutions together, pushing beyond the University’s gates, blending arts with humanities, being adaptable, and embracing the possible.

Since 2013, Poetry in America has evolved as an educational initiative from large, open-enrollment online courses, to a TV series, and a suite of educational programs supporting learners from middle school to adulthood, dual enrollment high school students pursuing college credit, current classroom teachers, and teachers in training. Contextualizing the form and methods of Poetry in America courses in relation to the schoolroom poetry of the past, and critical debates in literary studies about poetry in public, the author suggests that a schoolroom poetry for the present can prepare students to interpret any complex text, while also nurturing creativity, and recentering classrooms, wherever or whatever they are, as essential to civic life.

My maternal grandparents were from Warsaw. On one side, only my grandmother survived the Holocaust; on the other, my grandfather and his two brothers escaped together. My sense of family always included those who were lost to genocide. The absence has always been at least as visible as the presence. Ghosts. Shadows. Still images in stories. I knew they were there. Somehow. Somewhere. As of October 2024, these ghosts have a home, a place in the city, in their city of Warsaw, Poland. This was the last place they resided of their own free will. Their names are etched in brass, planted in concrete – stumbling stones or Stolpersteine, to be exact – to remind passersby of the last place they lived by choice in Warsaw. This public humanities/public art project reveals a lot about memory, monument, and meaning in a much-contested arena – the history of Jews in Poland.

It is possible to communicate academic thought without being reductive, but that rarely happens in U.S. news media. Instead, academia is mined to produce journalistic edutainment: a media product that turns information into entertainment. Edutainment is pervasive, particularly in U.S. public radio and podcasting, the medium in which the authors work. A major reason edutainment dominates audio is that it is difficult to convey complex ideas in sound. Listeners, unlike readers, cannot control the speed at which they engage with material, which puts them at constant risk of getting lost. In U.S. public radio, the default solution is to make information entertaining. This approach has encouraged strict rules about everything from the length of stories and use of sound to the tone of narration and narrative structure. These rules all but ensure the production of edutainment. It does not have to be this way. Audio can be a powerful medium for academic work. To succeed, one must not pander but instead challenge the rules and explore new formats that honor the complexity of academic work. This is the story of our attempt to do just that with a new audio show, Ways of Knowing.

During the pandemic, specifically in 2021, I established a virtual network that gathers Iraqi women academics who are based in the diaspora and in Iraq. The network is a private WhatsApp group and an X account that promotes the scholarly work of Iraqi women and fosters collaboration. We have attracted the attention of international institutions, enlarged our group to include Iraqi women academics across the continents, and introduced our work to a larger audience. Like any other group, the network has faced several challenges. We are academic women who are overloaded with endless tasks and burdened with family responsibilities, but we have found solidarity in our group. Our steps are small and slow, but we are making progress in enhancing the global visibility of Iraqi women academics and supporting the higher education system in Iraq.

This article takes a worm’s eye view of the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts and comments on the political realities that inform their operations. My work as a scholar and an applied theater practitioner with Aquila Theatre received program support from both agencies and has represented them at the White House, US Capitol, and US Supreme Court. I suggest that the traditional division that exists between arts and humanities, as reflected in the policies of both endowments, should be erased for the betterment of public-facing humanities, and, as a humanities program director, I want to address the structural problems of fundraising and the politics of money that inform the granting decisions of these US federal agencies.

The idea of a “public humanities” reflects a specific understanding not only of the humanities as a field of interest or set of disciplines but also of citizens’ needs in a democracy. This understanding was most fully articulated in the United States, where it informed the national understanding of the goals of education that emerged in the aftermath of WWII. What distinguishes the American conception of the humanities from other systems is the place of privilege accorded the activities of interpretation and judgment, and the conviction that these were most effectively inculcated through the study of literature.

This article draws a comparison between US border policies in the 2020s and the policies implemented by the British colonial regime in 1940s ‘Aden to dissuade Jewish immigration. It makes an original argument, based on documents from the British colonial archives and Jewish philanthropic sources, that the plunder of Jewish migrants was a consequence of British policy, and not, as scholars have sometimes assumed, a vaguely-defined “anarchy” in the Aden Protectorate sultanates (today, southern, and eastern Yemen). The history of British immigration policy – and the unofficial incorporation of both environmental and human forces into the project of dissuading Jewish migration – bears a striking resemblance to American policies in recent years. The perils of the Darién Gap and other deadly routes and the concentration of migrants in dangerous conditions on the US–Mexico border de facto incorporate the jungle, the desert, and criminal syndicates into the border regime’s efforts to disincentivize migration. A look at the archival record of a parallel story in 1940s Yemen/‘Aden allows us to glimpse the construction of policies that utilize unofficial actors and factors (from bandits to the hot desert sun) in a border regime’s campaign of terror against (potential) migrants. The article demonstrates the value of historical comparative cases for understanding the policies of governments today. Scholars of current events lack access to the intelligence reports, correspondence, and other once-classified documents available to historians, which allow for a fuller understanding of the ways in which similar policies have been developed and implemented.

President Theodore Roosevelt once called the Chautauqua movement “typical of America at its best.” Arguably, no public humanities effort in the United States has been as popular or influential as the Chautauqua movement. Those seeking educational, religious, and cultural fulfillment have flocked to the lakeside retreat in western New York since 1874. From lectures and book clubs to theater and debates, Chautauqua has provided visitors with endless opportunities to engage with the arts, humanities, and cultural studies to help them better understand their world, themselves, and each other. Efforts to expand the experience beyond the summer include the adult education movement the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, one of the nation’s longest-running book clubs. Shrewd businessmen, and communities who did not see themselves represented in the Mother Chautauqua, also opened their own copycat offshoots across the country. As the pillar of “edutainment” and tourist destination wraps its 150th season, are the utopian visions of the founders enough to sustain it for another 150 or is a new model needed for a nationwide public humanities movement?

Each year, I brace for National Hispanic Heritage Month, the intensely rich and active national holiday that takes months to plan, weeks to execute, and days from which to recover. With community partners, we often discuss how to best make use of this public holiday to spotlight our most pressing needs. As an educator, I use this public holiday to show students and colleagues, who are ever-more concerned about curricular alignment with workforce needs, about the importance of my mother tongue and its superpower to bridge communication in our multilingual nation. In the United States, more than 40 million people speak Spanish as their first language and there are more than 50 million speakers of Spanish. We can use this national public holiday to unearth and commemorate more widely – and loudly – that Spanish is also an American language. However, we might also realize that honoring our national Hispanic heritage needs more than one month.

The article describes the challenges of running for local political office and explains the significance or political parties, interest groups, and informal support structures created by women to help women and minority candidates win and successfully govern. Additionally, the article addresses a political context where women and minorities face increased concerns about running for political office in a highly polarized environment.

This article explores the concept of partnerships in public humanities as both a process and a vital outcome. Drawing from experiences within a classroom environment, where university students and community members learned and engaged together, we identify three key precepts for sustaining effective community-university partnerships: centering human relationships, leveraging institutionalization, and redistributing risk. These strategies do not aim to avoid the challenges inherent in collaboration but rather use complexities as opportunities for deeper engagement. We argue that community-university partnerships should themselves be viewed as a valuable and meaningful form of public humanities.