By Christina LaRose, PhD Candidate, English & Women’s Studies I discovered the power of storytelling in the early 1990s when Princeton historian Dr. Alixa Naff interviewed my Syrian great-grandmother, Najla Simon, for her book, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). I became intrigued by Najla’s oral history, which Dr. Naff…
Category: Public Humanities
From PhD to Public Humanities
By Joe Cialdella, Program Officer at the Michigan Humanities Council. Dr. Cialdella received his PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2015. Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t enter graduate school with the single goal of becoming a tenure track professor. It was not only the scarcity of academic jobs that…
Humanities PhDs in Museums
Many people who earn PhDs in the humanities go on to work in curatorial and research positions at museums. Others serve as museum educators, grant writers, exhibit designers, digital content developers, among other roles. In addition to their expertise on content, museum professionals use the critical thinking, research, and teaching skills they develop during doctoral…
Bass Connections
Duke University has launched a university-wide initiative to develop connections across disciplines and create a new model for education by helping students apply what they learn in the classroom to pressing problems in the world. The site contains course descriptions that offer models for tackling issues of popular concern through collaborative and applied research.
Syllabus: Theories and Methodologies of Public History and Culture
University of Michigan professor of history Matthew Countryman created this course on public scholarship, which “asks why and how scholars should make public engagement a central component of their scholarly practice. What are the best practices and methods for engaging the public in scholarly inquiry?”
Public Humanities Initiatives at University of Wisconsin
The Center for the Humanities at University of Wisconsin supports a number of initiatives designed to connect scholars and their work to the community. These include a graduate certificate, seminars, Mellon-supported fellowships, and many other exciting programs.
Innovative Courses at the Simpson Center for the Humanities
The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington offers courses at the graduate level that reflect its commitments to crossdisciplinary research, digital humanities, and public scholarship.
Georgetown Course: Humanities in the Community
This course, developed by Dr. Sherry Linkon at Georgetown University, takes up debates around the public value of the humanities, discussing the claims made by various commentators, from advocates and critics of the social value humanities as well as from scholars who study social change and community organizing. It pursues a practical approach by exploring strategies for using…
What’s the right job for bringing historical perspectives into public life?
By Amanda Moniz, PhD, Associate Director of the National History Center and Program Coordinator at the American Historical Association. Dr. Moniz received her PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2008. If you had asked me several years ago what public history is, I would have talked about museums. Indeed, museums are leading…
Is Public Scholarship About Telling Stuff To More People?
By Cassius Adair, PhD Candidate, Department of English I love to talk at people, which is one of the reasons I speak on more panels than maybe I should. Last month I ran– literally jogged across the Diag like a tardy freshman– from academic job market training in Angell Hall to a public scholarship panel…