Month: June 2019

Paula M. Krebs

The public humanities represent a capacious category, and these three articles illustrate a range of successful approaches. No matter what the approach, though, public humanities programs benefit the humanities in higher education. Such programs bring attention to the value of what we teach, as illustrated in Bill Nichols’s article about the ways Georgia State is taking language learning beyond campus walls. They extend campus resources to the community to show why funding for public universities is a public—not private—good, as demonstrated in Laura Anh Williams and M. Catherine Jonet’s piece about their popular feminist film festival in New Mexico. And the programs show the value of humanities research for a community’s understanding of itself, as Diane Kelly-Riley does with her work on the history of her Pacific Northwest company town, Potlatch, Idaho, and what happened to the community when its largest employer closed shop.

The more we bring our work to the communities around our campuses, the more our communities will understand the value of what we teach and study. We need the public to understand the value of the humanities—so parents will not be afraid to let students major in our fields, and so legislators will not call for abandoning our disciplines in favor of narrow workforce-preparation degrees. Connecting humanities education to career preparation, as Georgia State does, is a good resolution. But all this outreach work will only be fully embraced when it is fully recognized by institutional reward structures. So the next step is valuing outreach work in retention, promotion, and tenure cases. Share your best practices with us at Profession.

Free and Open to the Public: Film Festival Curation as Public Scholarship

Laura Anh Williams and M. Catherine Jonet

Originally created as an outreach strategy to highlight humanities scholarship and creativity in gender and sexuality studies, the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival (FBAFF) at New Mexico State University (NMSU) has become a continuously expanding endeavor since its inaugural season in 2016. The festival specializes in programming short films (fifteen minutes and under) created by student and professional filmmakers internationally. At its core, FBAFF is dedicated to promoting innovative feminist, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and socially conscious filmmaking with the intention of circulating underrepresented perspectives, aesthetics, and approaches to contemporary geopolitics (“2019 Feminist Border Arts Film Festival”). In this way FBAFF offers a vital form of public humanities engagement: by circulating ideas through a video art exhibition, public screenings of short films, discussion with invited filmmakers, and our own artistic production decisions—such as curation choices, design elements, and festival-related filmmaking and media promotions.

In New Mexico, borders are everywhere. The state is home to twenty-three sovereign indigenous nations and NMSU is situated less than fifty miles from both El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. We created FBAFF with the goal of highlighting films that interrogate margins, power, and liminal experiences, and the festival creates a space where we can change public understandings of what constitutes powerful and inclusive filmmaking. FBAFF also contributes to the mission of our land grant university: serving the educational needs of New Mexico’s diverse populations. New Mexico is a state that, since 2014, has placed forty-ninth in Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report, which measures factors such as “college and career outcomes, K–12 achievement and school finances” (Burgess); the state also placed forty-ninth (in 2017) and fiftieth (in 2016) for childhood poverty rates (Edge). New Mexico is also a state that is proud of its film industry, nicknamed Tamalewood, and New Mexico has no shortage of industry-focused film festivals with celebrity screenings and VIP after-parties.

In the gulf between these disparate realities of struggle and stardom, FBAFF attempts to intervene. The festival’s venue for artistically driven films goes beyond a pursuit for profit; the films disseminate knowledge about the human experience of precarious subjectivities with which we—and our underrepresented viewing publics—identify. By focusing on often excluded voices and experiences, FBAFF offers a platform for filmmakers who are committed to exploring nuanced, complex human and global issues. In this way, attendees benefit from perspectives different from those in mainstream, studio-driven filmmaking. In return, attendees articulate their own perspectives. During the culminating program of each year’s festival, attendees offer feedback on the festival through an evaluation questionnaire and vote for award recipients in filmmaking categories such as “best in festival.” Audience suggestions help shape and reshape the festival each year—for example, in response to feedback, the festival has gone from two hours to more than fourteen hours of programming in its most recent configuration—and the awards help filmmakers circulate their work to other festivals, seek funding, and work toward getting distribution. Moreover, FBAFF audiences actively participate in the broader cultural conversations that interrogate notions of power, storytelling, and representation both in front of and behind the camera.

Each year FBAFF has grown in new directions. In 2016, with the moral support of our department but few additional resources, our first festival screening took place in a reserved Technology Enhanced Active Learning classroom on campus, with a borrowed popcorn cart. Since that first year, FBAFF has fostered partnerships with NMSU’s Creative Media Institute, whose department head generously donates use of their digital media theater and popcorn cart each year, as well as with the University Art Gallery, whose director worked with us in 2018 to include a one-day screening of video art programming in their main gallery. Now in our fourth year, in addition to expanding our screening programs and continuing the video art exhibition, we have worked to maintain partnerships with filmmakers from prior years. With grant funding from the New Mexico Humanities Council, the Devasthali Family Foundation Fund, and the Southwest and Border Cultures Institute, FBAFF 2019 opened with a filmmaker showcase that featured a screening and roundtable discussion with four writer-directors, documentarians, and animators whose work has been presented at our festival in past years. Seeking out public funding has reinforced our commitment to the festival as an intellectual and creative endeavor with a public practice beyond the classroom and campus. As literary and cultural studies scholars, before FBAFF we had very little experience seeking external funding for our research and creative projects. The evolution and expansion of the film festival, as it has become a more fully realized endeavor, has made seeking out funding a necessity.

B. Ruby Rich describes the independent film festival as “the last refuge of democracy in this increasingly controlled and manacled world of ours, the last place where a true participatory discourse can prevail and where persons of deep-seated convictions and open minds can come to exchange views, surrender control, and be changed forever by what goes by on screen” (165). With FBAFF, we seek not only to expand the work we do as humanities scholars in gender and sexuality studies beyond our classrooms and majors but also to blur the distinction between town and university and create new viewing publics through the shared audience experience.

Before the festival each year, we spend hundreds of hours viewing thousands of submissions, facilitating a deliberative and purposeful curation process, and ordering final selections into a cohesive narrative trajectory for the screening program. Our curating and programming practices are an expression of our intersectional feminist and queer theoretical approaches—committed to interrogations of power, attuned to intersections of identity and difference, and invested in disrupting status quo politics of representation. In curating the festival, we put a wide range of works into conversation with one another to create thematic programs focused on important social issues such as the international refugee crisis or transgender embodiment in film. During the curation process, we weigh how a film fits with or extends the festival’s mission. We also gauge films by their ability to effectively and aesthetically communicate their perspectives to audiences while also being able to work alongside one another to form narrative threads throughout each program.  

We embrace Rich’s description of the film festival as “a political intervention into the market monopoly, a counter-offensive of imagination and difference” (164). Our labor is inevitably rendered invisible by the film festival program, and this labor’s impact is difficult to quantify or describe in measurable terms for our annual performance reports. However, selecting, grouping, and assembling the submissions into a cohesive program with a narrative trajectory is itself a form of creative activity and scholarly dissemination. The University Film and Video Association recognizes the intellectual rigor of university-based film festival curation. It states, “university-sponsored film festivals secure niche films that emerge from independent artists. These films represent a valuable addition to the culture of new media and cinema and might not otherwise secure exhibition or dissemination” (UFVA Policy Statement 18). For us, the value of our labor rests in advocating for the social value of art. Against the grain of the commerce-driven entertainment industry, we work to generate and share a program of socially engaged, innovative filmmaking to promote and circulate humanities scholarship with often underrepresented and vulnerable viewing publics.

Works Cited

Burgess, Kim. “Study: NM Ranks 49th in Quality of Education.” Albuquerque Journal, 4 Jan. 2017, www.abqjournal.com/920639/study-nm-ranks-49th-in-quality-of-education.html.

Edge, Sami. “New Mexico No Longer in Last Place on Child Poverty.” Santa Fe New Mexican, 16 Sept. 2018, www.santafenewmexican.com/news/ local_news/ new-mexico-no-longer-in-last-place-on-child-poverty/article_ ef2ffc0a-c7cb-59ee-b7d6-6e668dcc065b.html.

Rich, B. Ruby. “Why Do Film Festivals Matter?” The Film Festival Reader, edited by Dina Iordanova, St. Andrews Film Studies, 2013, pp. 157–65.

“2019 Feminist Border Arts Film Festival.” New Mexico State University Gender & Sexuality Studies, 10 Mar. 2019, genders.nmsu.edu/film-festival/.

UFVA Policy Statement: Evaluation of Creative Activities for Tenure and/or Promotion. University Film and Video Association, July 2018,  cdn.ymaws.com/ufva.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/ufva_tp_policy_statement_jul.pdf.

Company Town Legacy: A Public Humanities Project Exploring Corporate Influences in Rural Idaho

Diane Kelly-Riley

What happens to a company town when the company leaves? This is the central question informing my public humanities project, Company Town Legacy, which focuses on the rural northern Idaho town of Potlatch, once home to the world’s largest white pine mill until the mill closed permanently in 1981 (Kelly-Riley). Company Town Legacy is a university and community partnership that reflects on the legacy of corporate influence and the challenges of economic revitalization, renewal, and restoration in the rural American west. The American west is romanticized and mythologized, but the reality of life in these rural areas is often overlooked or misunderstood.

How Corporations Influence Cities and Towns in the United States

Corporations across the United States influence the daily lives of workers and shape communities—for better or for worse. In New York City, Amazon’s recent proposed headquarters expansion was met with fierce backlash about the public subsidization of corporations and the effect on communities, and Amazon withdrew its proposal (Goodman). These concerns extend to rural areas too. The yogurt company Chobani, for example, established a large production factory in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 2017, where it has been recruiting and supporting refugee workers, largely Muslim, from Iraq, Afghanistan, and sub-Saharan Africa. The community has dealt with ongoing racial and cultural tensions between these new workers and existing community members. And The Washington Post reports that, “across the country, people in meatpacking towns and agricultural areas are wondering whether their communities will hold on to a supply of Hispanic workers and other foreign laborers crucial to those industries” (Harlan). While corporations may initially provide resources and jobs, they also leave behind financial and social damage and consequences for communities once the area is no longer profitable.

The Rise and Fall of Potlatch, Idaho

Many towns in the Pacific Northwest were established by industries—such as logging, mining, aluminum, railroad, and shipping—to serve corporate interests and were purposefully structured to recruit and retain workers at the turn of the twentieth century. The lives of residents were shaped by connections between corporations and local governments that structured everything—employment, health care, shopping, entertainment, education—from cradle to grave. The town now known as Potlatch was established by the Potlatch Corporation in 1905, according to Keith C. Petersen in Company Town: Potlatch, Idaho, and the Potlatch Lumber Company. Potlatch was a desirable location for river-based transport for many industries because the Palouse River flows through the area once indigenous to the Coeur d’Alene and Nez Percé tribes. The Potlatch Corporation built, owned, and ran everything inside the city limits until the early 1950s, when the corporation’s support was no longer sustainable.

Even after corporations leave, their influence on town and city structures continues to unfold. The blueprints of company towns have been shaped in positive and negative ways. The 1914 plat for Potlatch shows the intentional stratification of residents by social, cultural, and economic status, which built economic disparity into the architecture of the town. Sixth Street was the dividing line between the bosses and the workers. The mill bosses lived in larger, fancier homes on Nob Hill, while the British, German, and Scandinavian immigrant workers lived—literally—below the bosses, in smaller homes north of Sixth Street; Greeks, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, and Irish were forced to live in the adjacent town of Onaway, Idaho, and were excluded from many of the amenities of Potlatch provided by the corporation (fig. 1). The class divide remains present in the geography of today’s Potlatch.

Fig. 1. 1914 Potlatch plat, from the Standard Atlas of Latah County, Idaho; published by Geo. A. Ogle and Co., Chicago, IL, 1914.

Inevitably, companies leave and residents are left to reckon with the lingering structure. The Potlatch Corporation sold its investments in homes and businesses and then withdrew all economic support in 1981 when the mill closed. In the three decades that followed, Potlatch went from a thriving, well-subsidized company town to one in which nearly two-thirds of the population met federal poverty standards. Today for most Potlatch residents, to live in Potlatch means to work elsewhere or to be among the few who are either agricultural landowners or independent logging contractors. The community of Potlatch has struggled to find ways to revitalize its economy.

Company Town Legacy in Potlatch

As an English professor at the University of Idaho who has lived in Potlatch for the past twenty years, I am aware of the overlooked struggles of people in rural company towns whose existence came into being solely to serve corporate interests. My project, Company Town Legacy, partners with the Potlatch Historical Society and the Return to Riverside Music Festival—a revival of a popular music venue in the form of an annual summer western music festival (“History”)¹—to reexamine the stories and history of Potlatch as a way to inform our future.

In creating Company Town Legacy, I’ve adopted approaches developed by Vanport Mosaic, a community-driven collective based in Portland, Oregon, that hosts year-round events (Vanport). Vanport Mosaic combines archival work and oral history preservation to produce theatrical and musical performances, documentaries, curated exhibits, and discussions. Extending Vanport Mosaic’s approaches to my teaching and research at the University of Idaho allows me to offer undergraduate and graduate students in English diverse pathways of study involving digital humanities and public engagement and to focus on rural settings.

One part of Company Town Legacy is collecting oral histories of people who attended Riverside Dance Hall. These oral histories were used as centerpiece discussion points for an inaugural event entitled Lager with Loggers, held in April 2019. This event combined humanities-based projects with live music and refreshments to promote the living and relevant role of these histories to community concerns. The goal of Lager with Loggers was to create a framework that memorializes and engages our community in historical events, that uses these remembrances as a way to understand what helped preserve and sustain the community after the Potlatch Corporation left, that highlights contributions of overlooked people and communities in these sustaining efforts, and that facilitates connections between the town and the land grant institution.

Another part of Company Town Legacy is preparing humanities students at the university for roles outside the academy. To this aim, I take advantage of the archives of the Potlatch Historical Society for undergraduate and graduate courses in digital humanities in the English department. Working with these archives gives students hands-on experience with primary source materials and emerging digital tools. Students gain technical experience scanning and recording metadata of images and documents as well as important experience working with members from the community, many of whom were laborers at the mill or worked in some capacity for the Potlatch Corporation. This work is also supported by the University of Idaho Center for Digital Learning and Inquiry’s digital initiatives collection (“Potlatch”). Participating students reflect on the representation of subjects, histories, and lived experience in and around Potlatch. They create several projects, including maps overlaying then-and-now images of Potlatch (Perrault et al.), a timeline of the creation of the town and mill (Dryden), an exploration of the role of women in the lumber camps (Stokes), and documentation of the dangerous practices used by loggers in the forests before the timber got to the mill (Thornton). Students have presented their projects to members of the Potlatch community and have had to consider how to compose their work for multiple audiences—community members who would view the projects in person as well as a broader audience of Web site visitors. These ongoing efforts take the history of an important, but smaller, rural Idaho town and reengage the community and university in ways that revitalize all our work together (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Shannon Dryden, a graduate student in English at the University of Idaho, looks through Potlatch Corp. time cards; 19 Mar. 2018.

Note

1. To address economic challenges, Potlatch established the annual summer western musical festival hearkening back to Riverside Dance Hall, once located along the shores of the Palouse River outside the borders of the dry company town. Johnny Cash even played at Riverside in November 1958, proclaiming, “Potlatch was the toughest damn town I ever played” (“History”). The revival of the music festival provided an opportunity to connect past to present and shed light on the community’s connection to its identity and potential economic restoration.

Works Cited

Dryden, Shannon. “Shaping a Company Town: A Critical Timeline of the Construction of the Potlatch Lumber Mill.” University of Idaho, Spring 2018, sdryden3.wixsite.com/phscompanytown.

Goodman, J. David. “Amazon Pulls out of Planned New York City Headquarters.” The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html.

Harlan, Chico. “In Twin Falls, Idaho, Co-dependency of Whites and Immigrants Faces a Test.” The Washington Post, 16 Nov. 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-twin-falls-idaho-co-dependency-of-whites-and-immigrants-faces-a-test/2016/11/17/f243f0da-ac0f-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html?utm_term=.a6882fe9ff33.

“The History behind Riverside.” Return to Riverside, www.returntoriverside.org/. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Kelly-Riley, Diane. “About Company Town Legacy.” Company Town Legacy, 2019, companytownlegacy.github.io/about/.

Perrault, Joseph et al. “Potlatch, Then and Now.” University of Idaho, omeka.cdil.us/s/then_and_now/page/map. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Petersen, Keith C. Company Town: Potlatch, Idaho, and the Potlatch Lumber Company. Washington State UP, 1987.

“Potlatch Historical Society Collection.” Digital Initiatives / University of Idaho Library, www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/phs/. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Stokes, Kit. “Flunkies and Loggerettes: Women in the White Pine Forest.” ArcGIS, www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=cd897eb9ea4c4544af3e1972ec924745. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Thornton, Rob. “Logging the Mountain.” Rob L. Thornton, roblthornton.wixsite.com/logging-the-mountain. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Vanport History. www.vanportmosaic.org/. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Embracing Tentacularity: Outreach, Advocacy, and Rethinking the Ecosystem of Language Departments

William Nichols

When I became chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Georgia State University (GSU) in 2013, the situation in which the department found itself was not unlike that of many other language departments around the country. Severe drops in enrollments, especially for courses at the 3000 and 4000 level, meant not only decreases in credit hour generation but also signified losses in the number of majors (in French, German, and Spanish). Consequently, our department saw increasingly diminished resources that included canceled courses, the termination of academic programs (namely our master of arts in German), and the loss of faculty lines through nonrenewals. Facing low faculty morale and a pervasive feeling of marginalization within the college and university, we began to ask ourselves a series of questions with the hope of recovering a sense of agency: Who are our allies both on campus and off, both academic and nonacademic? Who could be our strongest advocates? What is the value of our academic programs and according to whom? What are the core values of our department? How are our values communicated through our mission and through our curriculum? Are those values in line with the strategic initiatives of the college and university? If we have a mission, do we deliver on it? And, most important, where do we want to go and how do we get there?

We asked these questions so that we could align the mission of the department with the strategic plans of the college and university, but also so that we could assert the relevance of our programs both in the academic community and in the city of Atlanta. By asserting language proficiency and cultural competence as the core values of our department, we affirm its central role in the internationalization initiatives of the college and university. Moreover, the language department directly serves GSU’s diverse student population by focusing on career opportunities that open with language study while also preparing students to be conscientious global citizens. To thrive, we had to embrace our role as public humanists, preparing students for the world and making sure we were engaged with that world.

New Department Initiatives

As part of that role, our department undertook a rebranding effort that began with the revision of the departmental mission statement and led to changing the name of the department from Modern and Classical Languages to World Languages and Cultures. We have similarly changed the names of concentrations within our major as well as course titles to better communicate their relevance to real-world issues and more overtly demonstrate their connection with other disciplines. In lieu of a university-wide language requirement, the department has sought to incentivize the study of language and culture through the creation of innovative academic programs like the certificate of language ability, a bachelor of interdisciplinary studies in Hispanic media, and soon a workplace intercultural communication certificate. Within our classes, some faculty members are experimenting with a cultural engagement component of the final grade as well as nontraditional assignments that may marry technological skills with language ability and critical thinking, foster collaborative engagement, and better mirror how students might use their language skills and cultural knowledge after graduation. In our department, we have also rethought what recruitment looks like by engaging our alumni and allies in the community who advocate for the relevance of our programs. Through collaborations with the Offices of International Initiatives, Development, Career Services, and other academic units like the School of Hospitality and the Institute of International Business, our department has brought in representatives and recruiters from the CIA, the FBI, Amazon, and Marriott as well as GSU language alumni working at Mercedes-Benz, Delta, Wells Fargo, and the city of Atlanta to connect language ability and cultural competence to a wide array of possible career paths. While many may bemoan the perceived professionalization of academia and complain that our programs, especially those in the languages, have been subsumed into the vocational mind-set of a neoliberal discourse, the department views the focus on careers as a viable way to assert the value of the study of languages and cultures, as well as the humanities more broadly. Moreover, at a university like GSU, a minority-serving institution with a high number of first-generation students and almost sixty percent of its student population on Pell Grants, we believe that the attention on language proficiency and cultural competency is an issue of social justice that empowers students with the necessary skills to engage the world, navigate its complexities, and question the dominant narratives that frame one’s understanding of self and other.

Creating Partnerships

Over the last five years, the Department of World Languages and Cultures has worked closely with other GSU departments within the College of Arts and Sciences, but we have also strengthened our interdisciplinary connections across colleges with departments like economics, public health, hospitality, education, and international business. We have worked closely with the university’s administrative departments as well to promote our department’s curriculum and programming and to combine resources for outreach and fund-raising efforts. As an urban research university in the heart of Atlanta, we believe that a large state institution like GSU must consider itself a public good with strong connections to the community. By looking outside the university, we have sought to create practical opportunities for students to apply their language skills through internships, externships, and service learning. A welcome effect of these community partnerships has been the development of strong allies in the public and private sphere who speak on behalf of our programs. Through connections with K–12 school districts and the Georgia Department of Education—specifically the Office of World Languages and Global Workforce Initiatives, the City of Atlanta, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the World Affairs Council of Atlanta, binational chambers of commerce, the Georgia Department of Economic Development, and others—the department has widened the reach and positive influence of GSU in the Atlanta metro area and in the state; we are bridging the divide between higher education and K–12 and breaking down the walls of the so-called ivory tower.

Innovative Events

Because we believe in the power of the public university to engage society and affect the community, in 2014 the department applied for funding through Title VI in the Department of Education to establish a National Foreign Language Resource Center named the Center for Urban Language Teaching and Research (CULTR; cultr.gsu.edu). GSU’s language resource center is distinct from other such centers in the country because it emphasizes advocacy and career readiness throughout the K–16 continuum. CULTR’s two cornerstone events, the Global Languages Leadership Meeting and World Languages Day, aim to leverage GSU’s location to create a coalition of voices that articulates the value of language ability and cultural competence across the K–16 continuum. The Global Languages Leadership Meeting brings together business and private industry, nonprofit organizations, policy makers and government agencies, and representatives from the K–16 education continuum, all of whom have a vested interest in advocating for language learning. This event aims to forge strategic alliances and collaborations that reinforce the importance of language education.

The other event, World Languages Day, is organized as a global resource fair that invites employers to inform high school and college students about career opportunities available through the study of language and culture. CULTR has brought in partners such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, UPS, CNN, the CDC, Grady Hospital, the American Red Cross, the FBI, the CIA, the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration, the AFL-CIO, and many others. In addition, Mercedes-Benz, McGraw-Hill, Vista Higher Learning, Pearson, Mango Languages, and others have contributed to the event as sponsors. With over a thousand students attending each of the four annual iterations of World Languages Day, this event allows potential employers to inform their future workforce directly, without faculty mediation, about the need for global skills and the opportunities that open with language learning, no matter what the career field. The Global Languages Leadership Meeting and World Languages Day have also established an effective model for advocacy and outreach that other universities have expressed interest in replicating around the country. Both events have propelled GSU to a national stage for language advocacy. In CULTR events, we’ve created connections with organizations like JNCL-NCLIS, ACTFL, and the American Councils through the participation of leading language advocates like Bill Rivers, Marty Abbott, Dan Davidson, and Richard Brecht. In other words, change can and should be implemented on a local level, but never in isolation from the larger context of language programs at the state, regional, and national levels.

I believe it is useful for departments to think of the various initiatives their unit undertakes as part of a fragile ecosystem in which efforts are interconnected within the department but also form part of micro and macro ecosystems. If we work in isolation or in opposition to other units or the community, we endanger our own survival by ignoring the more nuanced ways we may adapt to a changing environment. Rather, language departments should embrace tentacularity by actively seeking collaborations across units and colleges in ways that allow us to insinuate ourselves into other programs, disciplines, and initiatives in clear, convincing ways that assert our relevance but also, and more important, benefit our students. However, while a department may feel a sense of urgency to change, it is important to remember that, in a time of diminished resources, we do not have the luxury of wasting time, money, or energy. By embracing strategic planning and backward design, we can accomplish multiple goals with each initiative. And then we can hope to find our niche in the ecosystem and not only survive but thrive.

In my final year of graduate school, I went on the job market for academic positions in literature and composition. At one of my campus interviews the head of the search committee asked how I planned to manage going from teaching one section of composition each semester to teaching four sections of composition, sections that included many English language learners. She gestured to several tall stacks of what looked to be recently collected student essays. At the time I didn’t realize that what likely weighed on her was not only the prospect of responding to all those essays but also the prospect of having to interview a bunch of graduate students from English departments who—like me—didn’t realize how cushy they had it teaching one section of composition. I ended up taking a year-long position elsewhere instead, and the following year landed my current job, where I have remained for more than a decade after that interview exchange. But the exchange has stayed with me, I think, because I have seen what a common occurrence that situation is: graduate students ending up teaching at institutions that bear little to no resemblance to the institutions where the students earned their degrees. Particularly jarring for newly professionalized faculty members is the transition from graduate school, where they spend time focusing on developing their content-area expertise through coursework (and perhaps even through teaching), to faculty positions that may not draw at all on that content-area expertise.

Because the majority of undergraduates in our country are not enrolled in research institutions, graduate students more often than not will find themselves landing jobs at teaching-centered institutions that may prioritize access over selectivity, including community colleges and regional public universities where the newly professionalized faculty members may be expected to teach four or five courses each semester. Moreover, many of the courses English graduate students are expected to teach once they become professionals may be in composition and not literature. Most graduate students in English will not, in other words, go on to teach one or two upper-level literature courses in their areas of expertise.

We need to do a better job preparing graduate students for this reality.

The MLA has recommended as much. In 2014, the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature released a series of recommendations to address the changes in higher education that have only become more striking since that interview more than a decade ago. The task force’s recommendations include the following regarding the kind of pedagogical training that doctoral students receive: “Doctoral programs cannot and should not assume that students will find positions in similar kinds of institutions or will want positions in similar institutions. Pedagogical training should introduce students to the wide range of institutions in higher education, diverse in mission, history, and student demographics” (16).

Picking up where the task force left off, I explore here two potentially productive ways of preparing graduate students in English to teach courses and populations of students that may not resemble their experiences in graduate school. The recommendations I lay out, although not comprehensive, emerge from discussions I have had with graduate students who are struggling to make this transition, as well as my own experiences as a teacher-scholar with one foot in literary studies and the other in composition. Because graduate students should not expect to teach only (if at all) in their limited area of expertise, both of my recommendations strive to bracket content for the sake of prioritizing the teaching of practices and processes to students. In doing so, these recommendations address the needs of newly professionalized faculty members who often become overwhelmed by their multiple preparations, particularly if they are thinking about their preparations in terms of content.

First, I contend that we should reframe graduate students’ pedagogical training to focus on the practice of composition more broadly.¹ Currently, most doctoral students are trained to teach first-year composition, a writing course. I am suggesting that doctoral programs think more expansively about the concept of composition as a practice in the construction of meaning so that graduate students are prepared to recognize their ability to teach interpretive practices, whether in writing classes as students compose meaning through their writing or literature classes as students compose meaning through their reading.

Second, I argue that because we cannot assume that students are applying what we teach them about literature to the world around them, we must incorporate attention to transfer-focused pedagogies into doctoral pedagogical training programs. For those reading this who are unfamiliar with the phrase transfer of learning, it is exactly what it sounds like: pedagogies informed by theories of transfer are developed explicitly to position students to use what they learn in one course or context in other courses and contexts. Transfer-focused pedagogies, which are an increasingly common approach to teaching writing, hold the promise of connecting the teaching of composition to the teaching of literature, and research suggests that, unlike most pedagogies, these kinds of pedagogies do, in fact, position students to apply what they learn in one course to other courses and contexts.²

If newly professionalized faculty members understand that the kind of work they need to be doing in terms of critical reading and transfer applies to all content, then the transition to teaching several courses that may not be in their areas of expertise won’t be as difficult. The shift I am calling for, then, is intended to move doctoral programs and the graduate students therein toward a focus on more universally needed pedagogies that have applications across content areas. This research-based approach to teaching—informed by studies of transfer of learning, as well as studies indicating the need for more attention to critical reading at the postsecondary level—potentially enables newly professionalized faculty members to see how the work of literary studies and composition relates while also meeting the needs of undergraduates who have important interpretative work to do both in and far beyond the classroom.

Meeting Doctoral Students Where They Are

The truism goes that we should meet students where they are. As we consider developing better ways of preparing our graduate students to teach heavier loads of both composition and literature courses to a range of student populations, we might first take stock of where they are. To my knowledge, there are no national standards that guide graduate assistantship training, which means that graduate students’ preparation varies considerably. Some graduate students engage in a week or two of preservice training; others take a course, a practicum, or both; others may be involved in more extended interdisciplinary training. Still, there are ways to capitalize on whatever preparation graduate students may have received in the teaching of composition to help prepare them to teach several courses in both composition and literature simultaneously without becoming thoroughly overwhelmed at their new institutions.

To begin imagining the connections between the teaching of composition and literature we must first recognize that both reading and writing are ways of constructing meaning. In writing courses, students are taught to compose meaning through writing; in literature courses, students are taught to compose meaning through reading. Foregrounding this connection would overtly connect graduate students’ teaching of composition to their teaching of literature. Moreover, conceiving of literary pedagogies in this way makes visible one of the most humanistic things we do when we teach literature: we teach reading.

Prioritizing the Interpretive Practice of Reading in Literature Courses

Because conceiving of the teaching of literature as the teaching of reading may seem like a huge leap, I want to begin by pointing out why it’s not. Kathleen McCormick has noted that plenty of literature instructors, which would include graduate students, are already teaching reading, but don’t identify as such:

Many literary theorists who specifically teach students new reading practices, and who ask students to read from particular perspectives with new sets of concerns—from perspectives of gender, race, or cultural politics, for instance—do not represent themselves as teachers of reading, and consequently miss an important opportunity both to locate the practices they are encouraging within students’ own educational reading history and to develop connections with others in the field who may share many of their goals. (6)

What I am calling for, then, does not amount to a reconceptualization as much as a privileging of certain aspects of the work of literary instruction. I am arguing for teaching literature with a deliberate and consistent focus on reading practices—qua reading practices—such as those McCormick lists above. This approach to teaching literature involves shifting attention away from “the teaching of literature as information about genres, poetic forms, images and metaphors” and toward an “exploration of how a reader’s mind interacts with a text to compose meanings” (Salvatori 658n2). Shifting attention away from a discipline’s knowledge base and toward its practices is by no means a new idea. In fact, Michael Carter has offered a compelling argument for conceiving of disciplines as “active ways of knowing” rather than “repositories and delivery systems for relatively static content” (387). Within the context of this discussion, such a shift supports a more overt and deliberate engagement with the generalizable principles of how interpretation works than does the learning environment that usually characterizes a literature classroom.

Because graduate students in literature—like those literary theorists McCormick describes above—may not identify themselves as reading instructors, and because graduate programs more frequently offer preparation for teaching writing as opposed to teaching literature, graduate students and their doctoral programs are missing opportunities to connect training in the teaching of writing to more literary-focused pedagogies. Acknowledging that literary studies involves the teaching of reading (however implicitly) is a first step toward helping graduate students make important connections to what they already know about teaching writing.

Within the framework I am describing, graduate programs would address the potential connections between composition and literary pedagogies either within their current teaching assistantship training models or in an altogether different setting such as an additional course or series of workshops that graduate students take much later in their careers as they are preparing for the job market and applying to positions. In a course of this sort, graduate students would be taught to approach literature courses as many of them have been taught to approach composition courses—namely, as courses in an interpretive practice. Taught this way, literature courses become courses focused on constructing knowledge through literature rather than about the literature itself (Salvatori 658).

Developing literature courses more focused on how we construct knowledge through literature by way of the practice of reading would also address the literacy needs of students. We know from various sources that students are not strong readers. For example, results on the SAT Verbal/Critical Reading portion (“Performance”) and the ACT Reading portion (Condition) from millions of students nationwide have indicated declines in students’ reading abilities. A study from the Citation Project also revealed students’ struggles with reading sources, leading Sandra Jamieson, a member of the Citation Project research team, to conclude that students “lack the critical reading and thinking skills necessary to engage with the ideas of others and write papers reflecting that engagement in any discipline” (16). In late 2016, a large-scale study conducted by the Stanford History Education Group found that students are not adept at evaluating—or reading—the credibility of online sources: “[I]n every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation” (Wineburg et al. 4). Deliberately and consistently foregrounding and teaching reading as the central interpretive practice in literature classes would therefore create continuity between the composition and literature courses that these new professionals teach. Such a shift would also address the struggles that postsecondary students across the country are having with reading.

A Bridge between Teaching Composition and Literature: Teaching for Transfer

Just as newly professionalized faculty members can draw on their doctoral pedagogical training in composition to support their teaching in the literature classroom, they likely have also been exposed to theories of the transfer of learning either explicitly or implicitly in that training. While theories of transfer have recently emerged as an area of interest in composition studies, educational psychologists David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon have been studying the transfer of learning within educational settings for decades. They explain that transfer requires some level of conscious or reflective activity and “occurs when learning in one context or with one set of materials impacts on performance in another context or with other related materials” (“Transfer” 3). Ultimately, their point is that while “transfer is integral to our expectations and aspirations for education,” “transfer does not take care of itself” in any classroom (“Teaching” 22).

Many doctoral students may, in fact, already be familiar with transfer-centered composition pedagogies such as the popular writing-about-writing approach developed by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs and adopted widely across the country. Even if newly professionalized faculty members have not been explicitly exposed to transfer-focused composition pedagogies, the first-year composition course is largely understood as the foundation that students need before moving on to other academic courses. Thus, the need to teach for transfer is implied and already a part of graduate students’ understanding of the goals of teaching.

A commitment to transfer-focused pedagogies also has important benefits for undergraduates from all populations. Doctoral students—and all of us—need to connect the interpretative work of the literature classroom to the world beyond the classroom so that our students can read not just literary texts but also the worlds in which we live. While many of us who teach literature would like to think we are already doing this—we are teaching students how to be close and critical readers of literature, which we believe will translate into students being close and critical readers of the world—we are not accomplishing this unless we teach for transfer. Because graduate instructors are often prepared to engage students in reflective and metacognitive activities related to their writing, instructors can rather easily be prepared to create similar activities surrounding students’ reading practices.

Before lending some specificity to this discussion by looking at a transfer-centered literature course that foregrounds reading, I want to address one of the concerns that this discussion may raise: that shifting attention toward pedagogy as opposed to content may, in fact, create more work for newly professionalized faculty members. This is simply not the case, and we can look at the rise of writing-across-the-curriculum and writing-in-the-discipline programs to help us think through this concern. Such programs gained footing precisely because faculty members across disciplines ultimately realized that they were not being asked to teach something extra—they would not be teaching writing in addition to content. Instead, they would be teaching writing to help students think about, understand, and apply the content. The same is true of the pedagogy I am describing. Attending to reading in the literature classroom within a pedagogical framework that fosters transfer in no way takes time away from the content of the course, but rather affects how that content is framed.

A Glimpse into a Transfer-Centered Literature Course That Foregrounds Reading

When I teach literature courses I capitalize on my own composition pedagogy training in many of the same ways I am proposing. One example of this is a short story class I first taught a few years ago and will teach again this fall. The class was assigned to me after the course in my area of expertise that I was expected to teach did not enroll the required number of students. I am using this example because I am by no means an expert in the genre of the short story. Neither am I an expert in any of the authors of the short stories I taught or the periods in which these stories were written. As such, this experience exemplifies the process I have described so far—namely, how to set aside my own content-area expertise and draw on what I do have from my background in composition to develop a course that addresses all students’ needs.

The course, aptly titled The Short Story, meets both an English major requirement and a general education requirement, so it is populated with a mix of majors and nonmajors, and was—and still is—the largest class I have ever taught. When I taught The Short Story, we covered what you might expect in such a course. We covered the history of the short story as a literary form and explored how plot, character, setting, point of view, style, and theme function in fiction. But the course was framed around the interpretative practice of reading, or in Carter’s terms, one of our discipline’s “active ways of knowing” (387). I divided the course into four units, each focusing on the practice of reading in some form: Reading to Summarize and Analyze; Reading the Short Story’s Authors’ Reading; Reading Critiques of Short Stories; and Reading Revisions, Adaptations, and Reinterpretations of Short Stories. Whether students were engaging Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Gilman’s own reading of her story in “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” or screening Smooth Talk, the film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” the practice of reading remained at the center of what we did in class. For example, we focused on how Gilman reads her own intentions, as well as how she reads her short story itself (students read “The Death of the Author” and learned about the intentional fallacy here, too). Similarly, we focused on how the screenwriters must have read Oates’s short story to create their adaptation. As such, our discussions raised questions not just about the texts but more often about the interpretive practice of reading.

To position students to transfer what they were learning about how interpretation works, I asked them to reflect regularly on their reading processes in reading journals and other related assignments to foster their own construction of knowledge about reading, their relationship to reading, and their individual reading strategies and practices. These metacognitive considerations shifted attention toward more generalizable issues surrounding reading as a form of interpretation and helped students understand how interpretation works, including what they bring to the “transaction,” as Louise Rosenblatt calls it. Ultimately, my background in composition helped mitigate my lack of experience with the course content and ensured that the general education students that made up the majority of the class were getting what they needed, which was not necessarily specific knowledge about these particular short stories but a course in reading, in interpretation—what reading is and how it works.

From the Writing Classroom to the Literature Classroom

As I look ahead to teaching The Short Story again this fall, I plan to incorporate even more attention to reading by teaching (rather than just expecting) students to annotate. Annotation makes the process of reading visible and, therefore, makes reading easier to address in the classroom. Doctoral programs can extend the previous training or experience that graduate instructors have in teaching annotation practices to composition students by exploring with them how a deliberate focus on annotation can enrich their literature classes, too. Once students’ readings are visible to themselves and others (through their annotations), they can share their readings in small peer groups the way they might read and discuss each other’s writing in a composition class. Digital platforms such as hypothes.is, Diigo, and iAnnotate have made this practice that much easier.³ When reading as a form of interpretation is the focus of the course, discussions look very different. Anthony Petrosky describes this shift, noting that while discussions include “reference to and reconstruction of the text to some degree . . . there must be, also, reference to and reconstruction of the reader’s associations—the reader’s schema—so we, the reader’s public, can see how he or she is putting it all together” (22). The process of working with literature in this way, Petrosky explains, “is similar to making interpretations and documenting them; as such, it is fundamental to the beginnings of any dialogue or dialectic that must ensue when people come together to understand reality” (35). The importance of helping students develop an understanding of how interpretation works—how the reader, the text, and the context coalesce to create meaning—cannot be overstated in our current climate, where dialogue is hard to come by and the interpretation of reality is up for grabs.

Final Thoughts

While the undertaking I describe here may be linked to our current climate, its importance can be traced to the very roots of humanistic studies, a point that Petrosky made decades ago as he reflected on the promise of reconnecting the fields of composition and literary studies: “[O]ne of the most interesting results of connecting reading, literary, and composition theory and pedagogy is that they yield similar explanations of human understanding as a process rooted in the individual’s knowledge and feelings and characterized by the fundamental act of making meaning, whether it be through reading, responding, or writing” (34). He further reflects, “Our theoretical understandings of these processes are converging … around the central role of human understanding—be it of texts or the world—as a process of composing” (26). Since Petrosky wrote this, English has become even more fractured and, as a result, has lost opportunities to capitalize on the potential in connecting reading, literary, and composition theory and pedagogy. The call I have sounded here—to prepare doctoral students to teach for transfer by foregrounding the interpretive practice of reading in their literature classes—not only offers newly professionalized faculty members a way to imagine their composition and literature teaching as complementary but also addresses postsecondary students’ difficulties with reading and engages students in some of the most fundamental work of the humanities: studying the centrality of the composition of meaning to human understanding.

Notes

1. Training is the MLA’s term. I acknowledge that the term does not adequately capture the more complex, education-oriented components of pedagogical programs, but I use it for consistency’s sake and to encompass the range of preparations that currently exist.

2. The transfer of learning involves more than application. In addition to Perkins and Salomon, “Teaching for Transfer” and “Transfer of Learning,” see Barnett and Ceci; Beach; Nowacek; and Wardle.

3. Traester provides an overview of an ongoing study of the role and impact of digital annotation tools in the classroom.

Works Cited

Barnett, Susan M., and Stephen J. Ceci. “When and Where Do We Apply What We Learn? A Taxonomy for Far Transfer.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 128, no. 4, 2002, pp. 612–37.

Beach, King. “Consequential Transitions: A Sociocultural Expedition beyond Transfer in Education.” Review of Research in Education, vol. 24, no. 1, 1999, pp. 101–39.

Carter, Michael. “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 58, no. 3, Feb. 2007, pp. 385–418.

The Condition of College and Career Readiness—National 2018. ACT, 2018, www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/cccr2018/National-CCCR-2018.pdf.

Jamieson, Sandra. “Reading and Engaging Sources: What Students’ Use of Sources Reveals about Advanced Reading Skills.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 2013, wac.colostate.edu/atd/reading/index.cfm.

McCormick, Kathleen. The Culture of Reading / The Teaching of English. Manchester UP, 1994.

MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. Modern Language Association of America, 2014. www.mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/Staffing-Salaries-and-Other-Professional-Issues/Report-of-the-Task-Force-on-Doctoral-Study-in-Modern-Language-and-Literature-2014.

Nowacek, Rebecca S. Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act. Southern Illinois UP, 2011.

“Performance on SAT Verbal/Critical Reading and Writing Exams.” Humanities Indicators / American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sept. 2016, www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=23.

Perkins, David, and Gavriel Salomon. “Teaching for Transfer.” Educational Leadership, vol. 46, no. 1, 1988, pp. 22–32, www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_198809_perkins.pdf.

———. “Transfer of Learning.” International Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd ed., Pergamon Press, 1992, pp. 2–13. Research Gate, www.researchgate.net/publication/2402396_Transfer_Of_Learning.

Petrosky, Anthony R. “From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 1, Feb. 1982, pp. 19‒37.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. 4th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 1983.

Salvatori, Mariolina. “Reading and Writing a Text: Correlations between Reading and Writing Patterns.” College English, vol. 45, no. 7, Nov. 1983, pp. 657‒66.

Traester, Mary. “Researching Annotation’s Impact on Student Reading and Writing.” The Hypothesis Project, 18 Sept. 2018, web.hypothes.is/blog/researching-annotation-impact/.

Wardle, Elizabeth. “Understanding ‘Transfer’ from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study.” WPA, vol. 31, no. 1–2, Fall-Winter 2007, pp. 65–85.

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. Writing about Writing: A College Reader. 3rd ed., Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2016.

Wineburg, Sam, et al. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Stanford History Education Group, 2016, purl.stanford.edu/fv751yt5934.

Charles Dickens’s ubiquitous opening phrase “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” seems all too familiar in any discussion of public humanities as it relates to the state of our profession and, indeed, to academia more broadly. And just as the term public humanities elicits anxieties about definition and praxis, it carries similar precarity in institutions of higher education.¹ To many in academic institutions, practicing public humanities starts with increasing the diversity of the students in our classrooms and the faculty members who teach them. On the one hand, major strides have been made toward this diversity: more and more universities seem to understand that they must forge a strong connection to the people and communities that surround their campuses, and terms like service learning and civic engagement have gone from niche to mainstream. Throughout the United States, a handful of universities have even designed centers and programs for public humanities to serve as leaders in the field.

On the other hand, much work remains to be done. Universities sit in the precarious position of both troubling and reinscribing traditional power structures.² Across humanities departments, particularly in fields like English, most of the tenure-track and tenured faculty is white, the vast majority of the faculty is contingent, and women and faculty members of color remain marginalized in various and troubling ways.³ Students face increasing debt burdens, and people not directly connected with college campuses still largely do not see these institutions as resources for their everyday lives. These continued disparities lead both critics and those involved in the public humanities to wonder if the public humanities are capable of doing the kinds of radical acts that move beyond diversifying the canon and enter into a phase of actively decolonizing our fields.⁴

While humanists must continue to analyze and rethink the boundaries and contours of the public humanities, we argue that a salient and productive discussion of the term public humanities starts with the assumption that the work and goals of the public humanities constitute a necessary (if imperfect) methodology for humanists in and beyond the academy. Defining the public humanities as a kind of humanities in practice, or principled action,⁵ we draw on the work of scholars like Teresa Mangum, who calls us to go beyond problematizing issues to doing something about them (5), and Kathleen Woodward, who argues for public scholarship that is purposeful and substantive in the service of “reduc[ing] the distance between the university and life” (123). The notion of action is central to the public humanities, and we argue that we can and should go even further, moving from action to activism.

The kinds of questions, concerns, and projects borne out of public humanities work are, in fact, increasingly crucial for scholars and teachers of historical literary periods before the early twentieth century for two core reasons. First, those of us who study pre-twentieth-century literary periods are seeing authors, public and cultural figures, and texts from our respective fields wielded by hate groups to represent (however accurately or inaccurately) nostalgic signifiers of an idealized white, Western, racist, patriarchal past—a procedure that actively devalues higher education and the democratic ideals in and beyond the university space. Our fields are being co-opted in ways that seek to destroy the very notion of openness and inclusion that the humanities has sought to cultivate. Second, higher education has been complicit in endorsing the white, Western intellectual tradition over and against other peoples’ traditions in myriad ways—such as the norms of the great books curriculum under which many figures of historical literature are categorized. This tradition is further amplified by the factors that determine who attends colleges and universities and under what conditions. Studies have shown that as more people of color began attending college during the 1960s and after, public funding for higher education began dwindling to the point of almost total precarity; in other words, the less white our classrooms have become, the more difficult it has become for the students in those classrooms to attend and to find success.⁶ These systemic injustices parallel other institutional abuses beyond (but including) the humanities; the most prominent example is the explosion in number of contingent faculty members and the attendant abusive labor practices that surround this hiring strategy.

As scholars and teachers of the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, a period that gave rise to core elements of today’s academy and that standardized the kinds of colonizing acts we must actively address in our work, we bear out our argument for the value of the public humanities by using Jane Austen as a case study. Austen is perhaps particularly susceptible to the kinds of false equivalencies between past and present that, as Laurie Grobman cautions, reduce complex systemic issues either to an easy teleological narrative of progress (“things were bad then; they are better now”) or, maybe worse, to a narrative that tracks cultural decline (“things were better then; they are bad now”; 130).

Yet we believe that Austen is also ideally situated to demonstrate how engaged public humanities projects can model a form of what we call activist presentism. While the term presentism is usually used pejoratively to describe ways of viewing the past through the lens of the present, we see it as a part of a principled intellectual position that has the means to redress the above-stated issues in humanities departments and academe more broadly and institute more just systems and practices in higher education. If we make the mistake of dismissing oppression because of its historical context, we lose an opportunity and also create real risk of harm. When arguments against presentism are used to shut down conversations about racism, sexism, and other forms of institutionalized oppression, we do a disservice to literature and its readers; in an attempt to be fair to the writer, who arguably can’t be held to contemporary standards of political correctness, we become unjust to the reader.

Instead, we see presentism as a means to open conversation—not in an easy, flippant way that makes reductive parallels between past and present, but in a messy, complicated way that helps us view both past and present as mutually constitutive and meaningfully connected. In using presentism with this activist agenda, we are following what our colleagues in the V21 Collective call strategic presentism (“Manifesto”), a kind of presentism that actively encourages literary historians and their campuses and professional communities to decenter and decolonize the power structures that have historically limited the participation of many first-generation students, students of color, differently abled students, and myriad people outside the classroom and academy from the work of campuses and of humanities departments in particular.⁷ This approach also revises our understanding of expertise to include the valuable contributions that students, new scholars, and nonacademics can bring to our teaching and research. Public humanities work in historical literary periods necessarily takes an activist mentality and methodology because it seeks to address the inequities within our individual fields and in and beyond the academy. When we reread the past to rewrite our future, we begin to do the work of activist presentism.

For literary historians, much of this process of activist presentism involves reconsidering our syllabi, our archives, and our canon—both researching and teaching understudied, sometimes anonymous texts that, whenever possible, are written by or represent the experiences of nonwhite, nonmale, nonelite groups. But doing public humanities projects also extends to the way we consider traditional assignments, the way we frame canonical authors like Austen, and how we understand what it means to read, write, and, importantly, collaborate with others as humanists and as members of multiple, overlapping communities. Our professional communities not only should be those to which we pay yearly dues but also must include colleagues from other departments, former and current students and staff members on our campuses, and agents and agencies in our surroundings, from local nonprofit organizations to people on Twitter and other social media platforms. To foster equitable collaboration, we must consider all these agents as equal partners who bring particular forms of expertise. This activist work changes not only what and who we read but also how and why we read and thus how we understand the push and pull between the past and the present. Through this process, the interpretive work of literary scholarship is fundamentally changed and made more inclusive and collaboratively dialogic.

Ultimately, we suggest that revising and valuing the practice of public humanities requires that we stop evaluating ourselves and our fields by the typically separate categories of research (directed only toward those trained like we are in our specialized subfields), teaching (serving only those students who sit in our classrooms), and service (benefitting our professional organizations, our universities, and maybe the communities immediately surrounding them). Instead, we can use the public humanities to revise this evaluative structure by viewing research, teaching, and service as mutually constitutive and as inherently demanding the participation of multiple agents and entities beyond these three typically distinct categories. In so doing, we begin to allow our fields more appropriately to represent the voices and experiences of the past and the present that have remained marginalized or entirely unheard. And through this (admittedly imperfect) process, we become better scholar-teachers of the historical literary periods that we study.

On Activist Presentism

As part of the 2014 MLA convention Presidential Forum, “Vulnerable Times,” in the session “Public Humanities,” our colleagues reflected thoughtfully, eloquently, and rigorously about the importance of engaged literary scholarship at a moment when critics from across the political and ideological spectrums were proclaiming the death of the humanities (a refrain that remains familiar today). Though these presentations, later published in Profession, outlined innovative approaches to a range of public humanities projects, at their core they also evinced an anxiety with the phrase public humanities and actively problematized the concepts of the public and the humanities themselves.⁸

Yet in gestures that resonate with our argument about activist presentism, all the contributors to the forum outlined their specific version of public humanities practice. Farah Jasmine Griffin described how her scholarship on jazz and African American literature and culture is clarified through her participation in the Jazz Study Group and argued that her scholarship necessarily requires interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, cross-generational participants, theories, and approaches. Griffin finds that this methodology was inspired by her personal experience participating in the black arts movement of Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s. During her reflections, which were amplified by the passing of Amiri Baraka, Griffin observed that in her formative experiences, activism and scholarship as a form of the public humanities were necessarily connected:

Here was one practice of public humanities in a community for whom all times are vulnerable, a site that recognized the historic roots of that vulnerability but also called attention to people’s resilience, beauty, and ability to resist. Public humanities in this context was actually about movement building, about informing a people, encouraging them to see themselves as part of a tradition, and feeding and nourishing their intellects and their spirits so that they might be moved to act.

For Griffin, public humanities is at once a rigorous critique of the past and a way forward that grew out of productive resistance to systemic inequalities. Her phrase that such work has happened “in a community for whom all times are vulnerable” captures the points of contact between past and present that creates a foundation for the kind of activist presentism that we advocate as part of the public humanities.

While Griffin’s argument is familiar to scholars who study literary periods during and after the twentieth century, and particularly for those scholars whose research and teaching center on communities of color, queer communities, the differently abled, and other traditionally marginalized groups, this activist-minded agenda is often absent from our peers who study literary and cultural works from earlier periods. The brilliant works of, for instance, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Alison Bechdel, and Terry Galloway confront readers with issues of systemic prejudice, racism, ableism, and violence and can quite naturally encourage activist-related questions and projects.

But what if you are a scholar of Jane Austen, a figure whose privileged position in literary history, in pop culture, and even on banknotes seems as though it is largely complicit in validating all forms of the status quo? As our fellow eighteenth centuryist Nicole M. Wright recently observed, Austen’s seeming elite, white gentility has been used by hate groups as a means of attempting to validate white supremacist reactionary rhetoric: “To my surprise, invocations of Austen popped up in many alt-right online venues. Venturing into the mire, I found that there are several variations of alt-right Jane Austen: 1) symbol of sexual purity; 2) standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture; and 3) exception that proves the rule of female inferiority.” Alt-right figures use this distorted image of Austen (erroneously) as a representation of pure Victorian morals, a move that is of a piece with other alt-right selective misreadings and half-truth representations; for instance, many white supremacists who stormed Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 appropriated symbols from medieval iconography in the hopes of promoting the cultural values of a time when white racial purity defined dominant culture.⁹ In the face of such violent, reactionary behavior, the literary historian’s dilemma is this: on the one hand, the canon of literary history remains predominantly white, thus preserving and to various degrees endorsing such use; on the other hand, as most specialists in these historical fields will tell us, no period was without resistance and unrest in response to these kinds of power structures.

While students and other audiences may not initially see Austen and her contemporaries as either complicit or actual participants in such blatant acts of intellectual and actual violence, many are rightly suspicious of how her works are relevant to their own experiences.¹⁰ Resolving in heterosexual marriages and including nary a person of color or of the lower classes as significant agents, Austen’s novels might at best seem to endorse a kind of rarefied world that has no bearing on the lived realities of today. But if, for instance, we focus on how Austen uses free indirect discourse to satirize the patriarchal perspectives of a Sir Thomas Bertram or a Henry Tilney (or even a Mr. Darcy), if we pair the uncomfortable silences when the topic of slavery comes up in Mansfield Park and Emma, or the silent nabob Miss Lambe in Sanditon, with contemporary abolitionist texts, we can see the ways in which Austen succeeds (and also fails) at engaging in politically charged topics about human rights. We can reframe the marriage plots in Austen’s novels as a study in the economic norms of the period and thereby understand the housing instability of Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, and even Anne Elliot as a critique of both the old feudal system of paternalistic landownership and the emergent system of capitalism; we can reconsider the relational dynamics between Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith beyond their superficially heteronormative outcomes, or the class dynamics between Anne Elliot and the disabled, working-class Mrs. Smith, as a comment on (if not an overt indictment of) the social welfare system in England. Standing armies and sailors provide this version of Austen with more than a ready battalion of heartaches.

We can engage students in service-learning projects related to literature and literacy and then use Emma Woodhouse to interrogate the snare of a savior complex. We can frame Northanger Abbey as a novel about a heroine who is overshadowed (and overpowered) by a high-level government official who relies on dubious news sources and a hero who is quick to deny a woman’s accusation of misogynistic violence, set in a city marked by the injustice of a broken system of global trade—and we can interrupt this interpretation with a plea in defense of the novel as, among other things, uniting a community of women against a male-dominated world that would mock and belittle them. When we write and publish about Austen, we can be sure to cite emerging and contingent scholars, as well as trans scholars, differently abled scholars, and scholars of color, at least as often as we cite those well-established, usually white scholars who have come before us; acting in solidarity with victims of sexual harassment or those who have been otherwise oppressed by academics in positions of power, we can question the abuser’s role in our own critical canon and replace that work with works from those people whose professional ethos encourages inclusivity and respect to others.

The ways in which our students and other participants discuss these characters’ experiences as familiar or alien become an opportunity for productive comparison that can help frame and clarify the relation of past and present and give all participants a more complicated understanding of issues of social justice in both the period in which the work was written and the present. These kinds of discussions alone will not solve the inequities that prompted them, but they are a necessary intellectual step toward the kinds of activism that we see as essential to the public humanities and to the humanities more broadly.

To move these discussions into action, we pair the questions and considerations we bring to bear as literary scholars with work done alongside students and community members in ways that value their expertise—bringing analyses of Austen’s portrayal of women’s agency into focus through conversations about the women’s marches in both the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries in, for instance, a multigenerational reading group that takes place in a public library. In this scenario, we would encourage the participants in the space, as well as the librarians, archivists, and other staff members who operate the library, to share their knowledge and questions instead of assuming that we would be lecturing and they would be listening.

Or, we consider how Austen’s portrayal of women’s education chimes with contemporary issues of educational access in public schools and in local educational nonprofits, locations where students, volunteer managers, public educators, and community members have spent countless hours, making them the experts of these spaces and their community members’ needs. We begin a conversation in class about how Austen’s own illness introduces questions of ableism that prompt us and our students to devise a public digitization project that makes historical literary works accessible for differently abled readers. In our classes and in these public spaces, in addition to assigning written forms of assessment (essays or surveys, respectively), we encourage participants to create free and online materials or podcasts where they take the initiative to discuss and interpret Austen in relation to topics that are meaningful to them—some might care about Austen’s role in pop culture, while others might want to consider how they can engage in a queer interpretation of Austen—all in ways that validate their knowledge and analyses.

In inviting this more democratic, multidirectional exchange, which we see as essential to the public humanities, we need to do the work of, first, reining ourselves in, admitting the limits of our own knowledge and experiences, and making ourselves vulnerable both in terms of controlling the direction of the discussion and in presenting our own intersectional identities, and, second, bringing others up, giving participants the confidence and agency to see their own knowledge and experiences as worthy and authoritative. This task of flattening potential power dynamics is eased with a figure like Austen; with five thousand members of the Jane Austen Society of North America scattered across our continent, we regularly meet nonacademic readers who have a more thorough and exact knowledge of Austen’s novels than we do, referring to particular chapters and lines with an ease and familiarity we can only aspire to. But we believe that any reader can offer a meaningful interpretation of any text, because we all come to that text with our unique lived experiences that will give us perspectives, opinions, and interpretations that can illumine that text for others. In all these instances, we reconsider the place and possessors of expertise by working with our collaborators in ways that underscore how their interpretations help us better understand Austen’s historical moment and our own.

On Activist Presentist Practices

These kinds of public humanities projects in literary history cannot happen without a series of strategic choices and considerable planning. The projects also must be flexible enough to allow for what we call productive failure: the notion that public humanities projects can and will involve trial and error but that the understanding they provide can allow for a flexibility that makes mistakes a source of productive change, rather than stasis or regression.¹¹ We outline here six steps that make public humanities work a collaborative effort among various agents and experts that stands to make our field more radically inclusive.

1. Active Questioning

Like any research or teaching, public humanities projects must begin with a series of questions. However, unlike traditional humanities scholarship, these questions must involve an actual dialogue with prospective partners—students, community groups, and other agents—and perform a kind of needs-based assessment of how to design a project that addresses the goals of all partners and participants. A professor might think that a local nonprofit would benefit from being inundated by forty undergraduate tutors, when in fact the nonprofit might be financially and temporally overburdened by such a presence and instead need help creating copy for its Web site or for other documents to help publicize its services.

Likewise, faculty members must design engaged projects, both in teaching and research, based in varying degrees on the interests and needs of students and community partners, instead of considering these stakeholders after the fact. While our initial instinct might be to figure out how to do this on our own, it is crucial to identify other participants and solicit their feedback in the earliest moments of the process, instead of waiting until a project has been framed and proposed.

Scholarship, too, can benefit from this kind of collaborative practice. Open-access discussions that take place on social media and other Internet forums, along with free talks at public libraries and other open venues, invite conversations and questions from people who bring their own experiences and expertise, in ways that can better shape the kinds of research questions we use when we go to an archive or a research library. Likewise, working with archivists and library professionals to open up and expand how the archives work for our individual research and for our profession as a whole is a crucial way of addressing the critical silences and gaps in these spaces, especially when it comes to traditionally marginalized groups.

2. Networking

Part of the process of asking questions involves networking, both in person and virtually. In addition to conversations with academic and university colleagues (including departmental colleagues, faculty and staff members performing related public research and teaching, and administrative staff members who run civic-engagement programs and student activities), students, and community agents, would-be practitioners of the public humanities would do well to consult social media forums like Twitter, which offer a useful space for querying other scholars and public humanities practitioners to discover current projects, best practices, and methodologies in real time.

3. Community Building

Through the process of questioning and networking, we can build a specific community of partners for each project to accomplish a shared goal, while also working together to support the specific goals of each contributor. We make a mistake if we see a singular public as distinct from and opposed to our campus communities. However isolated we may seem to be in our campus bubbles, we must understand that within and beyond our campuses there are multiple communities and publics, and by understanding and respecting the points of overlap and distinction among them, we are better able to do the work of public humanism.

4. Syllabizing

While we tend to consider the creation of a syllabus as a kind of course schedule and contract between instructor and student, we admire the work of the Charlottesville Syllabus and similar resources that consider distilling important readings and other activities as a significant form of response, activism, and critical activity that is not limited to the classroom. These online resources are sometimes traditional syllabi and other times various bibliographic lists with attached critical commentary or examples of projects, and they are accessible and useful for a variety of audiences and project participants.

5. Publishing

During and after the course or project, it is time to share this work in various forums: in campus communities, online, and in social media outlets. Making these scholarly and teaching resources available for others who have related interests helps expand the community that we have begun to build and create a larger collective set of actions that organically address the local needs of a given community. These open-access materials can also work to displace and replace problematic messaging from or about the academy or the authors, figures, and texts we teach and study.

6. Reflecting

Throughout the process of designing and implementing a public humanities project, it is crucial to scaffold reflection exercises for all participants on the successes and failures, starts and stops. In class and in other projects, reflection should include both formal and informal writing prompts, some cumulative and revised through a writing process, and occasional opportunities for anonymous feedback. Just as important is to set aside time for our own critical reflection, both individually and with project partners; social media forums might be another appropriate place to perform such thoughtful and self-critical evaluative work. Ongoing reflection allows us to honestly identify what may not be working and respond with humility and flexibility. Reflection also helps us pause, recognize, and celebrate what is going well. An iterative process of assessing and recalibrating the course is an essential part of a dynamic, relational project, and it reminds us that we, too, are still learning and can benefit from pedagogical practices we demand of our students.

Ideally, these final two steps—engaging in individual critical reflection and in community conversation about the course—may also open formal publishing possibilities on the scholarship of teaching and learning, creating additional synergism among our research, teaching, and service. Indeed, while we’ve broken down the above into discrete steps, these three roles—research, teaching, and service—often occur simultaneously and at multiple moments throughout the process.

Conclusion

In many ways, the public humanities are fundamentally political, liberatory, feminist, antiracist, and even transgressive, interrogating systemic privilege and power, opportunity and oppression. Within the public humanities, literature is a medium uniquely positioned to work on the deep beliefs we hold about ourselves and other people, and we believe that reconsidering these beliefs is the first step toward creating sustainable, actionable change in our departments, our communities, and our nation. To students or onlookers for whom literature seems at best an extravagant luxury and at worst an irrelevant distraction, this activist approach to historical literature can make their learning (and our professional lives) deeper, more critical, more meaningful, and ultimately more inclusive. In the face of an expert-scoffing, diversity-averse, post-truth society that rejects care for language as mere political correctness, it has never been more crucial to teach the past with a public purpose.

Notes

We thank Frank T. Boyle for his feedback on an early draft of this essay.

1. Wickman’s cheekily titled essay points to this crisis of connotative and denotative identity.

2. For a sustained critique of the public humanities within these contexts, see Mullen; for a discussion of this topic as it relates to service learning in literary studies, see Grobman. For a comprehensive overview of the tensions across the rise of public humanities, see Schroeder.

3. According to the American Association of University Professors, more than seventy percent of all higher education faculty members are contingent (“Background Facts”). Likewise, women who are full-time faculty members earn roughly eighty percent of their male counterparts, and far more women than men are contingent faculty members (Curtis). Matters are even more dire in terms of faculty members of color: according to the National Center for Education Statistics, just among the full-time faculty, “in fall 2016, 41 percent were White males; 35 percent were White females; 6 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males; 4 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females; 3 percent each were Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males; and 2 percent were Hispanic females” (“Fast Facts”).

4. On decolonization as a process that “advance[s] the undoing of Eurocentrism’s totalizing claim and frame, including the Eurocentric legacies incarnated in U.S.-centrism and perpetuated in the Western geopolitics of knowledge,” see Mignolo and Walsh (2); see also Patel; Smith et al.

5. The term principled action is borrowed from Cooper (12).

6. See Garcia; Greenwald; and Mitchell et al.

7. As Coombs and Coriale argue, “What if, by insisting on the recognition of the past’s difference from the present, we’ve made it more difficult to conceptualize why studying the past matters for the present? … Strategic presentism requires that we think of the past as something other than an object of knowledge that is sealed off, separated from the present by the onrush of sequential time. … To make presentism a strategy means asking how presentism might help us better understand and address the ways the past is at work in the exigencies of the present, from the recursive afterlives of British imperialism in our own era of war to the long arc of ongoing processes of dispossession under capitalism; from the economies of consciousness as a so-called global workspace to the anthropocene” (87–88).

8. On the subject of the need for action in public humanities work, see Mangum.

9. On this troubling form of citation, see Perry.

10. We discuss many of these projects in more detail, with contributions from dozens of collaborators, in Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice (Draxler and Spratt).

11. For more on the benefits of productive failure, see Draxler and Spratt 66–67.

Works Cited

“Background Facts on Contingent Faculty Positions.” American Association of University Professors, www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts. Accessed 10 Jan. 2019.

Coombs, David Sweeney, and Danielle Coriale. “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism: Introduction.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, Autumn 2016, pp. 87–89.

Cooper, David D. Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities in Public Life. Michigan State UP, 2014.

Curtis, John W. “Persistent Inequity: Gender and Academic Employment.” American Association of University Professors, 11 Apr. 2011, www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/08E023AB-E6D8-4DBD-99A0-24E5EB73A760/0/persistent_inequity.pdf.

Draxler, Bridget, and Danielle Spratt. Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice. U of Iowa P, 2018.

“Fast Facts: Race/Ethnicity of College Faculty.” National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61. Accessed 28 Dec. 2018.

Garcia, Sara. “Gaps in College Spending Shortchange Students of Color.” Center for American Progress, 5 Apr. 2018, www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecondary/reports/2018/04/05/448761/gaps-college-spending-shortchange-students-color/.

Greenwald, Richard A. “Just as More Minorities Access Higher Education, Public Support Recedes.” The Daily Beast, 12 May 2018, www.thedailybeast.com/just-as-more-minorities-access-higher-education-public-support-recedes.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Public Humanities: Crisis and Possibility.” Profession, Nov. 2014, profession.mla.org/public-humanities-crisis-and-possibility/.

Grobman, Laurie. “Is There a Place for Service Learning in Literary Studies?” Profession, 2005, pp. 129–40.

Mangum, Teresa. “Going Public: From the Perspective of the Classroom.” Pedagogy, vol. 12, no. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 5–18.

“Manifesto of the V21 Collective: Ten Theses.” v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/. Accessed 10 Jan. 2019.

Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke UP, 2018.

Mitchell, Michael, et al. “Unkept Promises: State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Access and Equity.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 4 Oct. 2018, www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/unkept-promises-state-cuts-to-higher-education-threaten-access-and/.

Mullen, Mary L. “Public Humanities’ (Victorian) Culture Problem.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 183–204.

Patel, Leigh. Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability. Routledge, 2015.

Perry, David M. “How Can We Untangle White Supremacy from Medieval Studies? A Conversation with Australian Scholar Helen Young.” Pacific Standard, 9 Oct. 2017, psmag.com/education/untangling-white-supremacy-from-medieval-studies.

Schroeder, Robyn. “What Is Public Humanities?” Day of Public Humanities, Apr. 2017, dayofph.wordpress.com/what-is-public-humanities/.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, et al. Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View. Routledge, 2018.

Wickman, Matthew. “What Are the Public Humanities? No, Really, What Are They?” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 4, Fall 2016, pp. 6–11, muse-jhu-edu.libproxy.csun.edu/article/643351/pdf.

Woodward, Kathleen. “The Future of the Humanities—In the Present and in Public.” Daedalus, vol. 138, no. 1, Winter 2009, pp. 110–23.

Wright, Nicole M. “Alt-Right Jane Austen.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Mar. 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/Alt-Right-Jane-Austen/239435.

Resources

The Activist Classroom

“#ArchivesSoWhite in the Words of Jarrett Drake,” Issues and Advocacy, Society of American Archivists

Charlottesville Syllabus

“Manifesto of the V21 Collective,” V21 Collective

“Syllabus Bank,” V21 Collective

Social Media Hashtags

#archivessowhite

#BIPOC18

#BiggerSix

#GlobalMiddleAges

#MedievalTwitter

#ShakeRace

#LitPOC

#POC19

What happens when a historicist is confronted with the prospect of presentism? The same thing that happens when a historicist comes face-to-face with anything else: it gets historicized. That’s what I set out to do. I did not expect to come to the conclusion that we need a new publication: the Journal of the Public Humanities.

I.

There’s always been tension between historicism and presentism. The term presentism originated in the twentieth century in the discipline of history as a pejorative for the faulty understanding of the past in terms of the present. Defining presentism as “a bias towards the present or present-day attitudes, esp. in the interpretation of history,” the Oxford English Dictionary gives 1916 as the term’s first instance (“Presentism, N.”). The term didn’t register a significant presence until the 1940s; its prominence crept slowly upward until, in the mid-1980s, its popularity skyrocketed. The term is now more popular than ever (see fig. 1), most memorably addressed in the 2002 essay “Against Presentism,” by the historian Lynn Hunt, president of the American Historical Society at the time, who wrote, “presentism besets us in two different ways: (1) the tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms; and (2) the shift of general historical interest toward the contemporary period and away from the more distant past.” In literary studies today, however, presentism is less a bad form of historical inquiry and more a good form of political scholarship.

Fig. 1. A Google Ngram search for presentism. The Ngram Viewer tracks the relative frequency of words over time in a representative sample from the digital archive in Google Books.

II.

“Good” presentism began in Shakespeare studies in the 1990s when Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes took issue with the new historicism dominating literary studies at the time.¹ New historicism was an update on the old historicism of the early twentieth century, which sought to study the past as scientists study the world: objectively.² Old historicism wanted what scientists call pure research (sometimes basic research)—an accurate understanding of the topic at hand, knowledge for knowledge’s sake. New historicism argued that the objective study of the past failed, first, because it focused too much on high culture at the expense of details from the margins of society, and, second, because we human beings, situated in the world as we are, are constitutionally incapable of engaging with the past outside the present’s conditioning influence upon us.³ Here presentism is not something to avoid or pursue. It’s a condition of being. We have never not been presentist.

New historicism pursued knowledge of the past within those confines, yet its quest for an updated, qualified, theoretically valid form of pure research obscured, for Grady and Hawkes, the importance of what scientists call applied research: the implementation of scholarly knowledge to enhance the quality of our lives and worlds.⁴ We must learn from the past, as the saying goes. In pursuing political efficacy, Grady and Hawkes drew on the British cultural materialism of the 1980s, the activist counterpart to America’s more scholarly new historicism, taking cues from Raymond Williams and Walter Benjamin, and before them Karl Marx’s complaint that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (15).⁵ In early-twenty-first-century Shakespeare studies, pure research fought back with a movement called new materialism, a return to the accumulation of historical particulars bordering on deliberately obscurantist antiquarianism (one of the movement’s leading proponents called new materialism “the new boredom” [Kastan 31]): history for history’s sake.⁶

So the tension is not between a historicism hoping to overcome the distorting frame of the present to achieve objectivity and a presentism using the concerns of today to motivate our study of yesteryears. The real tension is between a historicism trying to be pure research and a presentism aiming for applied research. The historicist wants to understand the world, the presentist to change it. There are different goals: the historicist wants knowledge, the presentist justice. The historicist wants to be a scientist, the presentist a politician.

III.

This is also the tension motivating Stanley Fish’s argument about professional correctness (Professional Correctness; Save the World). Arguing against professors and institutions of higher education who see their mission as the cultivation of good character in students and a citizenry prepared to participate in democracy, Fish thinks academics should aim low: don’t try to make your students better people; don’t try to fashion good character; don’t promote your principles of virtue; don’t advocate for policies and politicians. Instead, do what you’ve been trained to do. As a Shakespearean, I’ve been trained to explain King Lear, but I shouldn’t draw an analogy between King Lear’s unhinged premodern machismo and the same in Donald Trump. Remain in an analytical posture seeking an understanding of truth, Fish suggests; don’t lapse into an ethical or political mode aiming to better society. Here the belief that academia is a venue for the exposition of truth clashes with the belief that academia needs to exert moral leadership, especially in perilous times.

Why is there resistance to applied research in the humanities? Because if academia really is about the search for truth, as Fish argues (and I agree), it is difficult to apply the criteria of truth to ethical and political admonitions. Consider three statements: Donald Trump was born in 1946; Donald Trump is a dishonest politician; and Donald Trump should be impeached. The first is a statement of fact: it is transparently true. The second is a statement of interpretation: not pure data but analysis. Most people would accept the second statement as true because it is a reliable interpretation of evidence, but some would not, and others would qualify it. It is more difficult to determine the truth-value of the third statement. Is it true that Donald Trump should be impeached? Not to many people, even those who think he is a dishonest politician and much worse.

Ethical and political statements about actions we should take are problematic from the vantage of truth. Answers to the question What should we do? operate in the arena of opinion—more charitably, of judgment—rather than fact and truth. When we define academia as a discourse designed to search for, discover, and disseminate truth, ethical and political conclusions drawn from historical and analytical research are bound to be viewed with suspicion.

IV.

Fish’s argument about professional correctness annoys many academics who see it as reneging on the moral responsibility of higher education. I see it, instead, as an affirmation of truth as the greatest good in life, and a defense of the pursuit of truth in the face of a more immediate, less difficult pursuit of pleasure. Yet Fish’s call to “academicize” everything (Save the World 27)—analyze the topic at hand to understand it, but don’t politicize your knowledge to make the world a better place—obviously challenges a presentist who is interested in studying the past to motivate action in the future.

In Fish’s scheme you have, on the one hand, academics who know everything about the world yet have no say in the way it’s run; on the other hand, you have politicians running the world who know nothing about it. Ideally, there would be some institutional mechanism to ensure that academic knowledge about the world successfully transitions into public policy designed to make the world a better place. Climate change and gun control are only the most obvious failures to transition knowledge into policy, although in general, paradoxically, the sciences are better than the humanities at communicating their research to the public by exploiting the resources of the popular press to de-academicize their ideas and make them easily accessible to a general audience, explaining why they matter.

No one wants some government agency designed to transfer knowledge from academia to the public to be responsible for determining what the government holds to be true. That institution would instantly be politicized, with moneyed lobbyists able to buy truth. State-sponsored truth is not a good thing. The absence of that institutional mechanism is, however, what prompts academics acting on an individual basis to politicize their research in the classroom and in presentism. The discourse of presentism aims to mend—on an individual basis—a gap between academia and the public created by the absence of any recognizable initiative to make research in the humanities publicly accessible and consequential.

So maybe we stick to pure research: identifying and analyzing fact, truth, and reality, hoping academically derived knowledge succeeds in the marketplace of ideas, becoming public policy. That’s the status quo, but it’s feeble because the best ideas aren’t always the most popular. The status quo risks wasting the immense knowledge amassed by academics. A better solution is to presentize our academic research in the popular press. It’s absurd to me that the sciences have more formal and more successful strategies for communicating their knowledge to the public than the humanities, which explicitly specialize in language and communication. Popular science is an established genre.⁷ Science journalism is a thing.⁸ There’s no popular humanities or humanities journalism. To be successful, presentism requires a change of genre from the academic articulations done in academic journals, books, and classrooms to the public articulations done through the popular press and community events. Presentism is something we need not instead of historicism but in addition to it. Changing the genre of presentism will take time and energy, not to mention money; to be successful, presentism will need broad institutional and financial support.

V.

Over the past three years, I’ve grappled more than ever with Fish’s argument that politics have no place in the classroom. While I agree that academics should stick to their areas of proficiency rather than comment willy-nilly on current events, the Trump administration’s attack on facts, truth, and academic expertise renders such a distinction tricky, especially when I teach my first-year writing course. Defining academic writing (per Fish) as the search for truth, my course aims to teach students how to responsibly and effectively interpret evidence and construct arguments. The aversion to intellectual honesty and integrity in the Trump administration is squarely within the purview of the subject matter of our course; to ignore this characteristic of the administration would be to renege on my academic responsibility. And knowledge of things like tyranny and tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays helps us understand current events. We can talk about politics without being political as long as we pursue analysis and understanding, not advocacy and action. This is true even if the analysis is highly critical: we shouldn’t cower from speaking the truth as we understand it just because that truth is about politics or because it makes someone look bad. Just as the present can be used to motivate our interpretation of the past, the past can be used to enhance our understanding of the present—both cases still operating in the analytical mode of Fish’s “academicization.” So there’s something we could call analytical presentism, the first of several additional presentisms available to us.

With the turn of the twenty-first century, good presentism moved outward from Shakespeare to other areas of literary study. In 1999, Bruce Robbins brought it to bear on Victorian studies in a short essay, “Presentism, Pastism, Professionalism,” observing that a fetishistic pastism is as unwelcome as naive presentism. In 2008, the historian Lynn Fendler wrote the influential essay “The Upside of Presentism,” coining the term strategic presentism to describe the deliberate use of concerns of our current moment to motivate our study of the past. In 2015, the V21 Collective formed to promote “Victorian studies for the 21st century,” arguing that historical inquiry must be willing to generalize and theorize in abstract schemes with an eye toward the present (“Manifesto”). Especially with the V21 Collective, the promotion of presentism has been wrapped up with the crisis in the humanities; as student enrollment and research support shrink in the face of a preference for STEM fields, we humanists have been eager to illustrate our importance to outsiders who don’t understand or value what we do.

Meanwhile, another form of presentism popped up in Shakespeare studies: the massive field of Shakespearean performance, criticism, adaptation, and appropriation—what Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds term “Shakespace”—has led scholars to engage in historicist readings of presentist readings of Shakespeare. We can engage in a historicism of presentism, not simply as a theoretical position, which I have sought to historicize here, but as a human activity. We can analyze historically situated efforts to presentize the past—a historical presentism. Thus there are, by my count, six varieties of presentism:

• 1. Naive presentism: unreflectively using the terms of the present to interpret the past; bad presentism in the discipline of history
  2. Strategic presentism: deliberately using concerns of the present to motivate our study of the past; here the present is a lens for looking at the past, which is the object of study
  3. Analytical presentism: using an interpretation of the past to cultivate an interpretation of the present; here the past is a lens for looking at the present, which is the object of study
  4. Theoretical presentism: using particulars from the past to create abstract schemes and ideas with the potential to elucidate the present and even the future; a more ambitious form of the analytical model
  5. Political presentism: using applied research to draw parallels between the past and present for a call to action in the here and now; ultimately, the mode here is advocacy rather than interpretation
  6. Historical presentism: analyzing presentisms from the past—past uses of the past to interpret the present and the present to interpret the past; this model returns to pure research, but now doing pure research of applied research

Apart from naive presentism, none of these modes is inherently good or bad, better or worse than the others. And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with either historicism or presentism. No presentists think historical contextualization is a bad idea. No historicists think relevance is evil. Rather, different academics express preferences for different modes based on different desires, and there are disputes about the proper venue for each activity. These are matters of taste (each analyst’s preference for the mode of inquiry) and decorum (using the right method in the right time and place). Specifically, many historicists feel political presentism is inappropriate for academic writing and teaching.

VI.

Strategic, analytical, theoretical, and historical presentism are not problematic from the perspective of professional correctness; these models are pure research pursuing truth and understanding, though there are differences in subject (understanding of the past versus understanding of the present) and method (using the present to interpret the past versus using the past to interpret the present or future). These are presentisms Fish could get behind. Political presentism is troublesome, however, when we define academia as a discourse designed to search for, discover, and disseminate truth (as I, like Fish, think we should).

That’s why I (like Fish) think political presentism needs to be done in public venues rather than academic writing and teaching, but I (unlike Fish, whose book arguing these ideas is titled Save the World on Your Own Time) also think academic institutions need to support public writing and teaching more vigorously. Right now, humanists have no professional incentive to go public, a problem only exacerbated with the adjunctification of higher education. That’s why the rise of the public humanities is exciting and long overdue.⁹

VII.

In 2017 at a Shakespeare conference, Hugh Grady, one of the leading voices of presentism in Shakespeare studies, delivered the keynote address. His lecture, “Whiteness, Past and Present: Reading Antony and Cleopatra in the Obama Era,” was written years earlier, during the Obama years, but the edited collection it was part of went through several delays; Grady worried his talk would no longer apply in the age of Trump. There is a real tension between the completely legitimate desire to presentize our academic research and the equally legitimate protocols of academic publication—namely, peer review. Add to this bucket of cold water the issue of audience: the Shakespeare scholars in attendance at Grady’s talk already understood the issues about race he was revealing by way of a presentist engagement with the past. It was the folks not in the room who most needed to hear his ideas. Here presentism was preaching to the choir.

I told this story at the 2018 MLA Annual Convention during a roundtable discussion on presentism. As our conversation navigated first from questions about presentism as a highly technical question concerning historical methodology, then to questions about the place of politics in academia and academia in politics, and finally to questions about the public humanities, we saw presentism transform before our eyes into a banner term that brought together a wide swath of concerns. The common denominator was academics with knowledge about the past but concerns about the present, especially the eclipse of academic, specifically humanistic knowledge in the public sphere.

My final statement to the group was that I have a vision for a new publication situated somewhere between an academic journal and a news magazine. While there is mounting energy in the public humanities, there is also a gap in the publishing market that is not meeting this energy’s demand. There are peer-reviewed academic journals such as Public: A Journal of Imagining America and The Public Historian—by academics, for academics—that chronicle civic engagement programs and community outreach initiatives. There are outlets that de-academicize scholarly work for a largely academic but nonspecialist audience, such as JSTOR Daily, Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Scholar, and The Conversation. And there are journalistic venues that draw heavily from the world of academia, both established magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which have successfully transitioned online, and born-digital ventures like The Los Angeles Review of Books and Zócalo Public Square. Part of the demand for the journal I’m envisioning comes from authors writing for cultural magazines like these, which are multiplying by the day; going more in-depth, the journal would be an explainer for the explainers. But the demand also comes directly from a general public who, in the wake of the 2008 recession—when a panic about employability drove students to STEM, technical, and vocational fields—eschewed the humanities during their formal education. While many of those young professionals are now looking around and realizing how vital the humanities are—it’s people trained in the humanities that have saved the nation from collapse—there isn’t an agreed-upon platform for the public to find authoritative academic expertise on the emerging topics of the day. And there isn’t an agreed-upon venue for academics to write to the public in a way that is rigorous in thought and research, accessible in language and style, and speedy in delivery to readers. The United States doesn’t have a rendezvous for a public desperate for humanistic knowledge and the scholars ready to serve. Thus, both academics and citizens turn to a hodgepodge of news aggregators, personal blogs, and preferred outlets, such as Arts and Letters Daily.

VIII.

Enter the Journal of Public Humanities, a new journal that could connect an educated public looking for authoritative yet accessible academic expertise on the big issues of our times with humanities scholars looking to write for a general audience. JSTOR Daily (“Where news meets its scholarly match”) and The Conversation (“academic rigor, journalistic flair”) come closest to what I’m calling for, though they emphasize scientific and social scientific research, and coverage rather than depth.¹⁰ But as the public humanities solidify their institutional footprint—with graduate programs now established at schools like Brown, Yale, and Georgetown¹¹—let’s imagine a corresponding journal with scholarship for what society is thinking about. Big social questions, bold scholarly answers. Humanistic knowledge for the people.

The journal would be a meeting point, not only for the diasporic individuals and agencies working toward public humanities but also for that collective to connect with the people. Because the goal is a big-tent initiative, I imagine the Journal of Public Humanities could feature three genres: humanities scholarship for public readers; art, creative writing, and other nonscholarly modes by humanities scholars or engaged with the humanities; and articles about civic engagement in the humanities. It would be open to all periods and genres. It would be open to different methodologies provided the arguments attend to the relation of the past to the present. The presentism employed could be strategic, analytical, theoretical, political, or historical; the abiding concern would be the ongoing meaning and relevance of the past in the twenty-first century and beyond. To ensure responsiveness to current events, it would need to be an online publication, but, to ensure rigor and accuracy, it would need to be peer-reviewed. Those dueling commitments would require a nimble editorial board with flexible schedules; the journal would have to be well-funded to allow for course release or compensation for editorial duties. The journal should be dedicated to reversing the trend in which writers, reviewers, and editors do academic work for free. That model is indefensible in the age of adjunctification. We can no longer expect academic work to be rewarded with tenure down the line (though, because the journal would be peer-reviewed, junior academics, often discouraged from public writing, would get institutional credit toward tenure).

The journal might publish issues quarterly, four or five new articles each issue, some submitted, some commissioned. Those pieces would be of-the-moment, open-access, peer-reviewed, and long-form, written with both fire and footnotes. Imagine (drawing examples from the past few years) articles from a women’s studies scholar on #MeToo and #TimesUp; a medieval historian on Game of Thrones; a drama scholar on Hamilton in the context of the American musical; a rhetorician on Trump’s language and why it’s effective; a Latin Americanist on the significance of the song “Desposito”; a moral philosopher on whether religion does more harm than good; a legal scholar on the history of impeachment; a media scholar on terrorism as performance; a book historian on the publishing industry in the age of the Internet; a literary theorist on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature; a comparative literature scholar on contemporary North Korean literature; or an art historian on exhibits for the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. Imagine those essays appearing while society is talking about those issues, not two years later. Articles of this sort are out there, but scattered, so you have to hunt. Imagine, instead, scanning through an issue of the Journal of Public Humanities from 2016 to see a table of contents with titles like “The Case for Reparations,” “The Logic of Effective Altruism,” “Lessons from Literary Vegetarianism,” and “Single Women Are Now the Most Potent Political Force in America.”¹² Or from 2017 with “Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal with Black Male Sexuality,” “Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame,” “America’s Gun Fantasy,” and “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”¹³ Or from 2018 with “Literature and Happiness,” “The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” “Opening the Audiobook,” and “Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content.”¹⁴

IX.

If you look around and don’t see the journal you want to read, you have to create it. I want to be as clear and strategic as possible: I have no idea how to start a journal, and I’m not the first to think a journal for the public humanities would be a good thing. Previous efforts have fizzled out, but this time it feels different. We’re living in a different age than we were three years ago. I invite you to voice your thoughts with the hashtag #PublicHumanities. Lend support. Launch critique. Give advice. Express your interest to serve as a reader or adviser. What essays do you want to see? What’s your dream essay? (Mine would be David Quint, author of Epic and Empire, on Star Wars as an American epic.) What would you write about? Go ahead, pitch an idea. Maybe the conversation catches ahold. Maybe it creates momentum. Maybe it channels a common cause for a lot of people and agencies who have been thinking in similar ways. Maybe some of these folks have experience running a journal. Maybe some have ideas about funding.

X.

The mission statement at my school cuts to the chase: “The mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society” (“Mission”). Our schools exist for the people, so why do scholars usually write only for other scholars? That model bespeaks a vision of trickle-down education few of us would endorse, one that, if we look around, seems not to be working.

The system of education in America is in flux if not crisis. Government funding in public schools has fallen dramatically in the past decade. Intellectuals have ceded the public square to social media and cable news. There are social consequences. Level of education was a major predictor of how people voted in the 2016 presidential election. With attacks on facts, truth, logic, and expertise coming from the highest office in the land, the cycle is vicious, the future grim.

We need to show leadership, especially at well-off places like Harvard.¹⁵ We need to think more creatively about what education is and the best ways to do it. I work for the richest university in the history of the world. If we’re not willing to use our resources to educate the people—even those beyond our campus—we are failing the goal we set for ourselves. Let’s put our money where our mission is and fund a platform for educating not just our students, not just our colleagues, and not just our alumni but the citizens of America. Let’s show our students how to be citizen-leaders.

Notes

The author would like to thank Brooke Carlson, Evelyn Gajowski, Perry Gao, Hugh Grady, Tom Jehn, Steven Lubar, Cheryl Nixon, Diane O’Donoghue, Flavia C. Peréa, Christian Smith, Susan Smulyan, Doris Sommer, Kathryn Temple, and the Northeast Public Humanities Consortium for comments and conversations about the ideas presented in this essay.

1. This early history is best narrated in Grady, “Terence Hawkes.”

2. Old historicism sought to relate “how it really was,” as called for in the preface to von Ranke’s History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations. In Shakespeare studies, old historicism is especially associated with Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and Shakespeare’s History Plays.

3. The term new historicism was coined—unintentionally—in Greenblatt’s introduction to Forms of Power (3). See also Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics,” and Montrose.

4. See Grady, “Postmodernist Shakespeare”; Hawkes; and Grady and Hawkes. For further developments of presentism in Shakespeare studies, see also Fernie; DiPietro; Streete; Holbo; Grady, “Presentism”; Gajowski; DiPietro and Grady, “Presentism”; Drakakis; and DiPietro and Grady, Shakespeare.

5. “Shot through with chips of Messianic time,” presentism is grounded in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (263).

6. On new materialism, in addition to Kastan, see Wells; Harris; Bruster; Hadfield; Grady, “Shakespeare Studies”; Sedinger; King; Salkeld; and Stevens.

7. The magazine Popular Science was founded in 1872. See “History”; Topham.

8. On science journalism, see Rensberger; Bauer and Bucchi.

9. Broadly speaking, there are two versions of the public humanities. One seeks to promote public intellectuals translating academic ideas into public fora. The other seeks civic engagement by creating cultural and community organizations and partnerships outside academia. For a helpful history, see Schroeder. An additional set of reflections is available in the essays collected by Phiddian.

10. See daily.jstor.org/; theconversation.com/us.

11. See the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University (www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities), the Public Humanities at Yale University (ph.yale.edu), and the Connected Academics task force establishing a public humanities PhD program at Georgetown University (reinventphd.georgetown.edu).

12. See Coates; Singer; Mintz; and Traister.

13. See Morris; Nussbaum; Andersen; and Dederer.

14. See Moores; Rich; van Maas; and Dworkin.

15. This venture must be cautious that, as Mullen argues, public humanities initiatives can reify the hierarchy of authority that privileges moneyed academic institutions over grassroots public culture. But I think Mullen presents a false choice between public-facing academic initiatives and a radical restructuring of the university. Not all institutions are the work of the devil. Institutions can serve people if the institutions are properly directed.

Works Cited

Andersen, Kurt. “America’s Gun Fantasy.” Slate, 5 Oct. 2017, slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/fantasyland-book-excerpt-the-nra-won-the-gun-rights-debate-and-made-americans-fear-their-own-government.html.

Bauer, Martin W., and Massimiano Bucchi, editors. Journalism, Science and Society: Science Communication between News and Public Relations. Routledge, 2007.

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken, 1968, pp. 253–64.

Bruster, Douglas. “The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn, Palgrave, 2003, pp. 191–205.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, June 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

Dederer, Claire. “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” The Paris Review, 20 Nov. 2017, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/.

DiPietro, Cary. “Sex, Lies and Videotape: Representing the Past in Shakespeare in Love, Mapping a Future for Presentism.” Shakespeare, vol. 3, no. 1, 2007, pp. 40–62.

DiPietro, Cary, and Hugh Grady. “Presentism, Anachronism, and the Case of Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare, vol. 8, no. 1, 2012, pp. 44–73.

———, editors. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Drakakis, John. “Shakespeare as Presentist.” Shakespeare Survey, vol. 66, 2013, pp. 177–87.

Dworkin, Craig. “Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 44, no. 4, Summer 2018, pp. 674–705.

Fendler, Lynn. “The Upside of Presentism.” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, vol. 44, no. 6, 2008, pp. 677–90.

Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey, vol. 58, 2005, pp. 169–84.

Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Harvard UP, 1995.

———. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford UP, 2008.

Gajowski, Evelyn. “Beyond Historicism: Presentism, Subjectivity, Politics.” Literature Compass, vol. 7, no. 8, 2010, pp. 674–91.

Grady, Hugh. “A Postmodernist Shakespeare: The Current Critical Context.” Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification, Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 1–25.

———. “Presentism, Walter Benjamin, and the Search for Meaning in King Lear.” Shakespeare, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009, pp. 145–61.

———. “Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated Overview.” Shakespeare, vol. 1, no. 1–2, 2005, pp. 102–20.

———. “Terence Hawkes and Presentism.” Critical Survey, vol. 26, no. 3, 2014, pp. 6–14.

———. “Whiteness, Past and Present: Reading Antony and Cleopatra in the Obama Era.” 41st Annual Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, 21 Oct. 2017, Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, OH.

Grady, Hugh, and Terence Hawkes, editors. Presentist Shakespeares. Routledge, 2007.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Introduction. The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, special issue of Genre, vol. 15, no. 1–2, 1982, pp. 3–6.

———. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” The New Historicism, edited by H. Aram Veeser, Routledge, 1989, pp. 1–14.

Hadfield, Andrew. “Shakespeare and Republicanism: History and Cultural Materialism.” Textual Practice, vol. 17, 2003, pp. 461–83.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2000, pp. 125–39.

Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present. Routledge, 2002.

Hedrick, Donald, and Bryan Reynolds. “Shakespace and Transversal Power.” Shakespeare without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, edited by Reynolds and Hedrick, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 3–47.

“The History of Popular Science.” Popular Science, 23 July 2002, www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2002-07/history-popular-science.

Holbo, John. “Shakespeare Now: The Function of Presentism at the Critical Time.” Literature Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, Nov. 2008, pp. 1097–110.

Hunt, Lynn. “Against Presentism.” Perspectives on History, 1 May 2002, www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism.

Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare after Theory. Routledge, 1999.

King, Ros. “Dramaturgy: Beyond the Presentism/Historicism Dichotomy.” Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 7, 2007, pp. 6–21.

“Manifesto of the V21 Collective.” V21 Collective, v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/. Accessed 8 May 2019.

Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Marx/Engels Selected Works, translated by W. Lough, Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 13–15.

Mintz, Daniel R. “Of Trivial Importance: Lessons from Literary Vegetarianism.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 57, no. 4, Winter 2016, pp. 473–99.

“Mission, Vision, and History.” Harvard College, Harvard U, 2019, college.harvard.edu/about/mission-and-vision.

Montrose, Louis Adrian. “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” The New Historicism, edited by H. Aram Veeser, Routledge, 1989, pp. 15–36.

Moores, D. J. “Literature and Happiness.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, Apr. 2018, pp. 260–77.

Morris, Wesley. “Last Taboo: Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal with Black Male Sexuality.” The New York Times Magazine, 27 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/magazine/black-male-sexuality-last-taboo.html.

Mullen, Mary L. “Public Humanities’ (Victorian) Culture Problem.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 183–204.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame.” National Endowment for the Humanities, 2017 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Washington DC, 1 May 2017. University of Chicago Law School, 12 July 2017, www.law.uchicago.edu/news/martha-c-nussbaums-jefferson-lecture-powerlessness-and-politics-blame.

Phiddian, Robert, editor. Publics for the Humanities? Special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 4, 2016.

“Presentism, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/266885.

Rensberger, Boyce. “Science Journalism: Too Close for Comfort.” Nature, vol. 459, 25 June 2009, pp. 1055–56.

Rich, Nathaniel. “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” The New York Times Magazine, 1 Aug. 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html.

Robbins, Bruce. “Presentism, Pastism, Professionalism.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, pp. 457–63.

Salkeld, Duncan. “Shakespeare Studies, Presentism, and Micro-history.” Cahiers Élisabéthains, vol. 76, no. 1, 2009, pp. 35–43.

Schroeder, Robyn. “What Is Public Humanities?” Day of Public Humanities, Apr. 2017, dayofph.wordpress.com/what-is-public-humanities/.

Sedinger, Tracey. “Theory Terminable and Interminable: On Presentism, Historicism, and the Problem of Hamlet.” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, Fall 2007, pp. 455–73.

Singer, Peter. “The Logic of Effective Altruism.” Boston Review, 1 July 2015, bostonreview.net/forum/peter-singer-logic-effective-altruism.

Stevens, Paul. “The New Presentism and Its Discontents: Listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in Dialogue.” Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 133–58.

Streete, Adrian. “The Politics of Ethical Presentism: Appropriation, Spirituality, and the Case of Antony and Cleopatra.” Textual Practice, vol. 22, no. 3, 2008, pp. 405–31.

Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. Chatto & Windus, 1943.

———. Shakespeare’s History Plays. Chatto & Windus, 1944.

Topham, Jonathan R., editor. “Historicizing ‘Popular Science.’” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, vol. 100, no. 2, 2009, pp. 310–68.

Traister, Rebecca. “Single Women Are Now the Most Potent Political Force in America.” The Cut, 21 Feb. 2016, www.thecut.com/2016/02/political-power-single-women-c-v-r.html.

van Maas, Sander. “Opening the Audiobook.” Comparative Literature, vol. 70, no. 3, 2018, pp. 337–56.

von Ranke, Leopold. History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations 1494–1514. Translated by P. A. Ashworth, Bohn’s Standard Library, 1909.

Wells, Robin Headlam. “‘Historicism’ and ‘Presentism’ in Early Modern Studies.” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, 2000, pp. 37–60.

What does it mean for humanities scholars to engage the public? As part of the 2014 MLA convention Presidential Forum, “Vulnerable Times,” the session “Public Humanities” provided some answers to this perennial question. In her introductory remarks to the session, Laura Wexler sought to redirect the discussion around the public humanities away from the question of crisis and toward one of engagement. Inviting us “to face the public with the rich and much-needed resources of our institutions and organizations,” Wexler cautioned, “it is not advisable to do public humanities unless we have some idea of what we mean by the public and of how the humanities plays an important role in its formation.” The question at issue—What do we mean by the public?—is one of definition and effect, and it is not one that is easily answered. And Wexler did not attempt to answer it. Instead, she turned to the conditions that animate the problem—mainly that, like a digital image, there are no “traditional modes and shared locations of viewing” the public; “the pixel and the bit have left no foundational identity or location, including that of the public, unturned,” Wexler insists, only to surmise, “the problem is that we have to face this fact about the public before we can face the public.”

Whose Public?

I found the premises of these questions about the public and Wexler’s conclusion misguided. Michael Warner has argued that “publics exist only by virtue of their imagining” (8); in Wexler’s formulation, the public imagined is not only external to the humanities and humanists but also atomized by digital technologies. While it is true that we in the humanities must reckon with the way digital technologies are changing how we think about the public and ourselves, Wexler’s vision seems too totalizing and preemptive. As Warner further argues, publics do not exist as such until they are imagined through engagement itself, and such engagement is in fact “to engage in struggles—at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise—over the conditions that bring them together as a public” (12). If we prioritize defining the public we hope to engage ahead of actual engagement, we run the risk of conjuring phantoms and directing our energies to no one in particular. We should not, in other words, preemptively define the public we hope to engage insomuch as we should do public work and, in doing so, find a public defined, imagined, and realized through our collaborations with the institutions, communities, and persons we encounter in the process.

I could not help wondering if the institutional composition of the MLA session had something to do with Wexler’s insistence on defining a public as the necessity for humanists in the digital era. For in this session on the public humanities and vulnerability, the majority of speakers came from elite, private universities (one from Yale, two from Columbia, and one from the University of Chicago) or R1-designated research universities (the University of Illinois, Urbana, a land grant university, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a public university). Perhaps it was the cynic in me that questioned whose vulnerability and what kinds of public were at stake. But it was strange that, in a session about public humanities in vulnerable times, there were no humanities scholars from state universities or community colleges, many of which find themselves especially vulnerable, where the fight is not just for the humanities but often for adequate public funds that would secure the future of the institutions themselves. As an assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University, one of fourteen universities in Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, I am a member of the very public with which I look to engage, and it is a public that is increasingly susceptible to budget cuts. In Pennsylvania, our state system has operated under the perpetual shadow of vulnerability. State funding dollars have evaporated; Pennsylvania funding per student is two-thirds that of the national average (“Financial Data”). In response to funding catastrophe and declining enrollment, two separate system reviews have been conducted in the last two years. Both see similar problems but propose radically different solutions. The first, commissioned by Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, advocates for the nonclosure of state universities (Pennsylvania), while the second, commissioned by the state legislature and conducted by the RAND Corporation, proposes several options, most of which would abolish the state universities in Pennsylvania as they now stand by merging them with each other, converting them to state-related universities (effectively making them private entities), or placing them under the management of current state-related universities, like Penn State (Goldman et al. 36–44). Neither review proposes increasing state funding even though both acknowledge the paucity of funding as a primary problem. It is not just the humanities that are in crisis in the system in which I teach. It is the institutions themselves. It is the public that the humanities constitute, sustain, engage, and support.

There is no immediate solution to this problem—or at least no immediate politically feasible one. The assault on Pennsylvania’s public universities is just one particular manifestation of the more general trend of public higher education divestment that Christopher Newfield examined almost a decade ago. And yet I want to propose some pathways that, if they are not a solution, might mitigate the erosion of the public from public institutions. In what follows, I look to rethink the paradigm that would necessitate imagining the university as external to the public it seeks to engage and the public as an abstraction that must first be defined before meaningful engagement might take place. To do meaningful public humanities work is to forge partnerships that reinforce local, public institutions and that establish clear public-public collaboration. A lot of this work may be downright unoriginal. But its unoriginality can be its strength. Iterability breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds normalization. Do a new thing, but do a new thing with the goal of establishing it as old hat. At the risk of sounding conventional, I do not think we need to be entirely innovative in our approaches to public engagement, not if these approaches do more to publicize our engagement than to fortify the public engaged.¹ We do need to be purposeful, which means we should be looking to partner and collaborate with public institutions both in terms of what we might offer as academics and in terms of what those institutions need or want.

Putting the Public Back into Public Partnerships

Perhaps the easiest way to engage the public is to ask local public institutions how we can be useful to them. That is what I did with my local library. This summer, I will be offering a course called Summer with Shakespeare at the Bosler Memorial Library, one of eight libraries in the Cumberland County Public Library system. The course began with an e-mail to Nicholas Macri, the adult programming assistant at the Bosler. In addition to programs and events, the Bosler hosts the Carlisle Institute for Lifelong Learning (CILL). The CILL was founded in October 2015 and is the result of efforts from a number of people, one of whom, Brenda Leach, was an adjunct instructor at Lebanon Valley College at the time of CILL’s founding. Macri thought a course on Shakespeare would fit well in CILL’s summer program, and so we set up a meeting and ironed out the logistics of the course. The course will meet once a week for six weeks, beginning in June and ending in mid-July. We will cap the participant list at twenty students, though we may schedule another session if there is a surge of interest. The course will coincide with the Bosler’s robust summer program, the Summer Learning Challenge: A Universe of Stories, a series of events, contests, and programs designed to encourage children, young adults, and adults to read and to discuss their reading over the summer months. Everything about the course will be free, including the books, because of the funds the Bosler has available.

I plan on teaching Much Ado about Nothing and Othello. Both are plays that center on the stories we tell about ourselves and others and how those stories supplement prejudicial ideologies—misogyny and racism, not the least among them—to terrible ends. In this respect, these texts complement the Bosler’s Summer Learning Challenge theme. But my teaching of Much Ado about Nothing is also meant to coincide with another act of public engagement by other local actors. The Gamut Theatre Group, a nonprofit theater company local to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, will be performing Much Ado about Nothing for its annual, free Shakespeare in the Park performance. Gamut does public outreach work regularly—in fact, the group performed a version of Julius Caesar at Shippensburg University for local high school students—and my hope is that we will be able to coordinate a discussion forum, or at the very least a field trip to one of the performances.

There is nothing novel in this way of engaging the public. Libraries are a natural ally in public humanities work. That allyship, however, is not unidirectional. While it is tempting for us to imagine that it is we academics who bring our resources to institutions outside our own, it is often the other way around. Describing the microcollege resulting from the Bard at Brooklyn Public Library partnership, Eugene M. Tobin reminds us that local public libraries “continue to be remarkably adaptable, nimble, and effective agencies of reinvention.” In Bard microcollege, the library brings something new to higher education—namely, the publics it serves that remain underserved by universities and colleges, traditionally marginalized persons like those who are homeless, immigrants, or previously incarcerated.

Such partnerships with local libraries are needful reminders that academics can act in ways that enable an imagining of themselves and their institutions as coextensive with the public they hope to engage. In doing so, they also might reorient us and so awaken us to all the ways the university or college is but one of the many institutions that work to educate the public (and the public the institutions). The rubric of partnership also provides a means of conceiving of public humanities work outside of what Kathleen Woodward describes as “the demoralizing rubric of service or the paternalistic rubric of outreach” (110). Instead, the rubric of partnership brings us closer to something like participation. In working with the Bosler, for instance, I am reminded that intellectual work is not something I bring from the university to the public. Instead, by participating in the Bosler’s ongoing intellectual programming, I am able to extend the work I do at my public university to my public library. I do not imagine my Summer with Shakespeare course as altogether different from the Shakespeare course I teach during the semester because my course at the Bosler is not a special offering either from me or from the library. It will be part of a program the library offers every summer, and the course is a version of one I teach every year. While the teaching of this course in particular will be new to me, my students and I will be working in an institution that has long been versed in doing the hard work of producing knowledge collaboratively by asking shared questions and through processes of serious intellectual inquiry.

Getting Credit for Public Humanities Work

While I find it useful that my work with the Bosler is not merely imagined as outreach or service, I also want to be clear that my imagining it otherwise derives from material causes. The work I will be doing with the Bosler is not extra. It constitutes who I am at present as a professor at a public state university, and it is also a means of securing my future there. If we are serious about supporting public humanities work, we must, well, support public humanities work. At my university, it is part of my department’s culture to partner with local institutions in this way. I was inspired, if not impelled, by the example of my colleagues, nearly all of whom do similar kinds of public engagement work. But my motivation for this course does not just come down to a matter of departmental culture or my spirit of service. It is also a matter of funding, tenure, and promotion. I want to stress this point because the work of public engagement should not be exploited as a form of volunteerism. Public engagement takes work, and it should be counted as such. While it is true that I would be happy to do this kind of work in addition to the work normally tied to promotion at my university, I can say that I am doing it now as a first-year assistant professor because it counts toward the research, teaching, and service I am expected to do for tenure and promotion. Not only does it count, but my institution actively encourages this kind of work through student-faculty summer research grants (what they call SURE—Summer Undergraduate Research Experience—grants).

In designing this summer course, and through the funding of the SURE grant, I plan to hire an undergraduate teaching and research assistant who will, in accordance with his or her own interests and intellectual goals, create lesson plans with me and locate textual and other supplementary materials to enrich the experience of students in the course. Together, we will produce a course reader filled with synopses, discussion questions, source material, annotated bibliographies, and suggested further reading. At the end of the course, we will donate a copy of this reader to the library. The student will then present the summer research at our fall-semester undergraduate conference, which focuses on this kind of scholarship.

I realize not all universities valorize and promote this kind of public humanities work. In the course of her sustained advocacy for the legitimacy of public scholarship, Julie Ellison has rightly observed, “scholarly legitimacy, supportive infrastructure, and cross-sectoral communities of practice are intermittent realities for public humanities scholars,” and she further contends, “[t]o improve on this partial advance, new public humanists need to find pathways to ‘institutional agency’” (296). But we should also be clear about the sources of such agency. These sources may in fact not be all that new, either. At my university at least, that agency comes not so much through any individual initiative but through a strong, proactive faculty union, for it is my union that secures the forms of support and pathways for public engagement for me, my colleagues, and my students. Public humanists should not merely imagine ways they might support long-standing public institutions and purposeful ways to partner with them. Academics who look for institutional support cannot merely look for it, for it will not be there. They must advocate for its centrality to the mission of public and private universities. After the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which nullified the right of public unions to collect fees from nonunion members, academics must also actively pursue institutional support.

Supporting Colleagues in Public Institutions

I want to end this essay by returning to Wexler’s question, What do we mean by the public?, and by offering an answer that turns us back toward the university. It is tempting to imagine public engagement in terms of externalized programming or nonacademic teaching. I am, after all, doing just that kind of work this summer. The public engaged through this kind of work often feels amorphous and depersonalized, at least at first. But another way to engage the public is to reach out to colleagues at your local state universities and community colleges, who not only are a public—their jobs, after all, depend on public funds—but also might provide pathways to publics otherwise overlooked by those in institutions with economic, cultural, and social ties a step or two removed from state subsidy. When I was still an adjunct hoping for a tenure-track position at Shippensburg, Carol Ann Johnston, who teaches at Dickinson College, reached out to me to support me, guide me, and champion me in my precarity. One way she did that was to introduce me, and eventually my students, to Dickinson College’s holding of first editions of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, among other rare books. Johnston had worked hard in recent years to get these books to Dickinson. Knowing that I was teaching a British literature survey, she offered my class the opportunity to see, touch, and think about these texts that they had only encountered in their Norton Anthology. With the help of the college archivist, she provided a curated, personalized tour of the collection. It was a deeply rewarding experience for us all, but I think a profound one for my students, who can at times feel acutely the frictions of access. What made their experience handling Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained so profound was not just their encounter with 350-year-old rare books. That was part of it. But the other part was entering a space otherwise walled off from them as students. In handling these artefacts and in listening to Johnston explain the histories of print and production of Milton’s books—and this book in their hands—my students came to understand that they too had permission to know things they might not otherwise dare to know, let alone touch.

What Johnston did was a small gesture with large consequences. She quite literally opened a door for my students, one closed to them by steep costs of tuition and their not knowing what they need to know common to first-generation college students. I recount her generosity here as a means of encouragement, if not galvanization. Public engagement need not look like summer programs or large, publicly visible initiatives. It can look a lot like hospitality. Public engagement can look like those of you in private institutions partnering with and supporting your colleagues at public ones. Research with them. Write and publish with them. Provide access. Go local, and leverage your institutional privileges, whatever they are, to the benefit of the public right outside your door.

Note
1. See Leary, who has argued recently that universities should resist market-derived conceptualizations of innovation, especially as such ideas come to reconstitute the identities and mission of public universities. His concern is over how the university imagines what or who it serves. As he claims, the turn toward the marketing of universities as “storehouses of innovation and engines of the ‘knowledge economy’ . . . marks a shift in the way universities see themselves and their students: as servants of industry rather than the public.”

Works Cited

Ellison, Julie. “The New Public Humanists.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 2, 2018, pp. 289–98.

“Financial Data.” Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, www.passhe.edu/FactCenter/Pages/Financial.aspx. Accessed 7 May 2019.

Goldman, Charles A., et al. Promoting the Long-Term Sustainability and Viability of Universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. RAND, 2018.

Leary, John Patrick. “Enough with All the Innovation.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11 Nov. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Enough-With-All-the-Innovation/245044.

Newfield, Christopher. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Harvard UP, 2011.

Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Strategic System Review: Findings and Recommendations. NCHEMS, 12 July 2017, www.nchemsproject.com/system-review. Accessed 4 Mar. 2019.

Tobin, Eugene M. “Public Libraries Are Reinventing Access to Higher Education.” Shared Experiences Blog / The Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, Feb. 2018, mellon.org/resources/shared-experiences-blog/public-libraries-are-reinventing-access-higher-education/.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2002.

Wexler, Laura. “MLA Presidential Forum: The Public Humanities in Vulnerable Times.” Profession, Nov. 2014, profession.mla.org/mla-presidential-forum-the-public-humanities-in-vulnerable-times/.

Woodward, Kathleen. “The Future of the Humanities—in the Present and in Public.” Daedalus, vol. 138, no. 1, 2009, pp. 110–23.

I was at an MLA Annual Convention reception a few years ago, talking to a senior colleague in my subfield. Our conversation was animated, but when it turned to the scholarship of a third colleague—a mutual acquaintance whose work falls outside our area of expertise—things got strange. I said I thought highly of our acquaintance’s research. He strongly disagreed. He found the work substandard.

“But it was featured on the front page of The New York Times!” I said.

“Exactly!” he replied, as if that fact better supported his point about its insubstantiality, rather than mine about its significance.

I’ve thought about this exchange a lot since it happened. I’m certain this man didn’t have greater knowledge of the subject than our headliner colleague. I suspect he loves public radio and public television. Does he have a problem with the public humanities?

The academic humanities have a public problem. We can’t decide if we should value—or how much value we should assign to—speaking to those who aren’t seen as “one of us.” Yet our profession will be strengthened, and research outputs of all kinds improved, if more of us choose to engage with a public beyond our students and scholarly communities. In the long run, research addressed to nonacademics may be just as beneficial to the creation and dissemination of knowledge as our peer-reviewed scholarly books and articles. Ultimately, faculty members, staff members, and students depend on public support for our efforts in classrooms and libraries—in person, in print, or digitally—whether we work at private or public institutions. We should all want our ideas to find many audiences, not just the fewest, best, or supposedly smartest readers, viewers, or listeners.

That’s why I join colleagues who advocate for more public-facing scholarship and for our valuing and evaluating such scholarship more fairly in academic performance reviews.¹ Those of us already doing this work also need to step up to demystify the process of beginning it. This essay contributes to those aims in two parts—first with a story describing my unplanned start down a public humanities path, and second with the anatomy of a pitch.

The Accidental Public Humanist

My launch into public humanities work was neither sensational nor glamorous. This is important for me to communicate, especially to those who think you must begin with a big splash. On the contrary, you can, and probably should, start slow and small. As with any new area of expertise, the building of public writing and speaking skills will happen over a period of years, not on a single good day or a whim. I’ve written about the nuts and bolts of some of this process for The Chronicle of Higher Education (Looser, “Writing” and “Making”). I haven’t yet made it clear that my commitment is long-standing and that it started decades ago with a particular audience.

My accidental origins in the public humanities date to 1994, with an invitation to speak at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting. JASNA is made up of thousands of members whom academics have traditionally depreciated as enthusiasts or fans. Its annual meeting draws 500 to 750 attendees. JASNA also consists of some eighty regional groups across the United States and Canada (“Regional Groups”). Speaking to its audiences, large and small, provided me with an early training ground in public humanities, despite the fact that initially I wasn’t looking for the training. I didn’t know I needed or should want it.

The JASNA meeting was unlike other conferences I attended. Academics were a distinct minority, most brought in as speaker-outsiders. Some of us enjoyed diving into this subculture more than others. I appreciated that JASNA events featured a lot of laughter. Whether Austen studies should have a sense of humor wasn’t something I’d thought much about. I certainly could have. In Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, Michael Bérubé tells a story of visiting his wife’s Aunt Judy on Cape Cod. When Bérubé shares that he’s turning his dissertation into a book, Aunt Judy “snapped, ‘What’s your book like? Is it funny?’” He admits that the question “was a stopper” and decides it’s an important consideration if he “ever wanted to write for people other than my dissertation committee and their colleagues” (xi). That question—Is it funny?—began to loom large for me after JASNA meetings. Reading Austen’s fiction aloud could make audiences laugh. Why was so little Austen scholarship humorous?

I’d been reading funny, public-facing work by smart feminists that was busting the stereotype of the humorless women’s libber. Regina Barreca’s They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted and the cartoons of Jennifer Berman (Adult Children and Why) imprinted themselves on me then, although I didn’t grasp that they were shaping me as a scholar. At the time, I bought into the idea that academic success meant addressing, and impressing, senior scholar-stars. The goal was to become what Tressie McMillan Cottom dubs an academic “micro-celebrity”—to become “extremely well known with a small group of people, as opposed to popularly well known among the popular masses” (Hayes and Cottom). That micro-celebrity system’s implicit message to those of us just starting out was to accept its narrow terms and its claims to be meritocratic. Try to publish in the right refereed journals or with the right presses, seek a tenure-track job to prove yourself, and let your ideas sink or swim with the gatekeepers.

As part of that standard academic quest, I’d decided there ought to be a collection of essays on Austen and feminist theory—there wasn’t one yet—and that I should propose to edit it. I mailed letters to admired, established scholars, explaining my plan and soliciting essays on the subject. One of them wrote back to advise me not to waste my time on an edited collection and to publish my book instead. Another suggested I should contact her most talented graduate student. (I did, and we remain close colleagues.) A third told me to republish an essay of his that had already appeared in a European journal but hadn’t yet attracted the readership it warranted.

It was the scholar Alison Sulloway’s response to me that had the greatest impact. She sent back a touching letter explaining that she’d just moved into a nursing home and was ending her research efforts. I replied to her letter, expressing gratitude for her groundbreaking book, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. We began corresponding back and forth, about our commitment to feminist scholarship and our complicated personal lives. Her letters were unusual, beautiful, and painful. Soon she was describing her physical and cognitive decline, using stick figure drawings of herself. When she had to withdraw from giving her scheduled lecture to JASNA’s 1994 Annual General Meeting, Sulloway suggested that the conference organizers invite me to speak in New Orleans in her stead. They did, offering to waive the hefty conference registration fee and to pay for a night in a nice hotel. I’d just completed my first year as an assistant professor at Indiana State University. I was twenty-seven, I’d never been to New Orleans, and I hadn’t stayed in many nice hotels. It was an easy yes. I had no idea what I was doing.

I delivered an abstruse presentation on Austen and feminism to fifty or so audience members. I didn’t conceive of them any differently than I would have an audience at an MLA convention or an American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting. These were the audiences I’d previously presented papers to, six or so times. Planted safely behind the podium, I read my prepared remarks declaratively off of a printed page. I believe I did try to look up every so often. When we arrived at the dreaded question-and-answer part of the hour, a middle-aged man in the audience raised his hand.

He asked me, politely, “What do you mean by feminism?”

Colleague, I got defensive.

I haphazardly backed my rhetorical truck into the parking spot of his question.

“Well,” I said, “of course, no one agrees what feminism is. There are debates about what it is. I’m not saying that I think it’s just one thing. Obviously, I don’t think that. I mean to say that there are feminisms, plural, not just singular, and we need to be very conscious of that fact.”

Then I said something like, “Judith Butler, blah, blah, blah. Denise Riley! Is there really such a thing as a woman? Or truth? Gender is performance, because . . . social construction. And poststructuralism! So there you have it. No one knows what’s feminism.”

I don’t recall if he said a thing in response. What I do remember, very clearly, is that from the back of the room, a hand shot up. It was Professor Ruth Perry, another speaker on the JASNA program. She addressed herself first to the man with the question. The exchange now feels seared into my brain.

“Feminism,” she said, “is a social justice movement that argues that women have not been treated equally or fairly over the course of history and up to the present day.”²

Then, addressing me, she said something like, “Feminism seeks to remedy that inequality both through political activism and through research, writing, and sharing knowledge.”

I think—or at least I hope—I said “Thank you.” I may have gone into a fugue state. I knew I’d messed up. I’d answered an unpretentious question as if in a nightmare version of my comprehensive exam or as if transported to week 5 of a feminist theory seminar. I’d utterly mistaken the audience, not to mention what my role was in presenting information and leading a conversation.

Perry was graciously and powerfully showing me how to do it better. Her example encouraged me to begin to develop new habits and skills: Listen better for tone. Start positively and declaratively, if you can. Be brief. You don’t have to say it all. You’re pointing the way forward. Consider your questioner’s needs, of course, but think about the entire room as you frame your answer. Don’t question the question. Don’t immediately turn to the debate’s fine points. Think broad brushstrokes. Above all, practice this stuff.

Sulloway and Perry gave me gifts. They gave of themselves generously, not only to me but to many scholars and nonacademic publics. But what kept me coming back to JASNA was not just such colleagues. It was a growing and eventually a complete appreciation for the organization’s nonacademic audience. Made up of teachers, accountants, nurses, lawyers, stay-at-home parents, librarians, and one fierce theology student with an Austen tattoo on her thigh, JASNA conferees were the most prepared and hungry “students” I’d ever had. They made me see clearly what Paulo Freire meant in Pedagogy of the Oppressed when he talked about cocreators of knowledge.

I floated new ideas with people who often knew Austen’s texts far better than I, on the level of the word and sentence. Many thought differently, which challenged me. They were usually exceptionally grateful for the expertise that speakers brought. I have a friend who refers to the academic world as having an affirmation deficit. If so, then by comparison JASNA has an affirmation surfeit. At JASNA meetings, with encouragement and exchange, I grew as a critic and public speaker. I began to reconceive what I could, or should, write. I practiced thinking, writing, and speaking outside of traditional academic modes of communication.

More than anything, though, these exchanges were fun. A scholar could be playful at JASNA and not take oneself so seriously. Academic conferences then seemed to me, by contrast, full of people grasping at opportunities to hold the floor—posturing, squabbling, belittling. The fun at academic conferences, if it happened, seemed confined to late-night drinking, with cathartic rehashings of the day’s posturings, debates, and takedowns. Or maybe I was just in with the wrong crowd. In any case, I might not have noticed these patterns without experiencing JASNA.

In a group of people devoted to author appreciation, it’s not only OK but expected to say that you love what you’re doing there. You aren’t asked to interrogate perpetually whether your positive take is inappropriately unreconstructed. (How rarely we academics ask ourselves if our negative takes are inappropriately unreconstructed.) It seemed to me that few academic conferences then were building in opportunities that harnessed affirmative energy, celebrated the unserious, or acknowledged the power of the glass half full, or a third full, or with any sober splash in it at all.

JASNA helped me see the price of using relentless wet blanket, top-down, and preachy approaches with nonacademic audiences. It rarely got your ideas the hearing they deserved. I want to be clear: I am not advocating for ridding one’s scholarship of the delivering of bad news. There are plenty of good reasons for righteous anger and rigorous critique, not to mention many situations in which they ought to be deployed. What I’m saying is that it does not serve us well to stick to one script. Smug outrage should not be an academic’s default mode of communication with the public. We need to use a variety of approaches to persuade. What I observed is that ritual condemnation did not inspire most readers or listeners to reflection, learning, or action.

That’s not to say all was sanguine positivity at JASNA meetings. Difficult conversations about the past and the present have been happening, too. Especially in more recent years, considering cultural conflicts through the lens of the inequalities of Austen’s era has come front and center. JASNA members do not share a common politics. It’s one of the membership’s proud features and a notable strength at a time when it’s difficult even for nonpoliticians to “talk across the aisle.” But when Cornel West—who describes himself as an Austen fanatic—spoke at the annual meeting in 2012 about Austen’s understanding of human suffering, he received a standing ovation (Schuessler).

Although not every humanities area has its JASNA equivalent, there are thankfully many ways forward. Scores of organizations may prove a similar training ground. Many of them welcome public-facing scholars who seek to engage listeners, such as public and private libraries, civic clubs, senior retirement communities, and Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt’s Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice outlines opportunities and emerging methods for building public engagement. Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University describes why we should seek out these methods.

There are endless digital ways to interact with new audiences. Social media may not be a social good, but it can be used to extend the reach of good scholarly ideas, in ways that were formerly available to just a handful of elite academics. There is new potential for getting your ideas heard. That route may seem a loss to the cohort of academics who came of age in the halcyon days when the overworked department secretary, or your put-upon wife, typed up your book manuscript and when university libraries ordered each and every university press book. Lament the passing of those days or welcome them, as you see fit. Either way, you are increasingly responsible for building your own audience for your research. Shrug that off at your own risk.

Fortunately, you don’t have to begin a podcast series or launch a digital magazine to forge new connections. It’s not difficult to get in contact with someone who hosts or edits one, to express your admiration, and to offer your services. No matter what your scholarly expertise is, some aspect of it might be reframed to speak to nonexperts. This doesn’t have to mean selling out or dumbing down. It can be an act of creative translation. This also doesn’t mean giving up being a scholar who speaks to other scholars. It should be a both/and situation. For my part, I wish we academics would get in the habit of devising a public-facing companion piece to highlight our discoveries and conclusions each time we publish a traditional work of scholarship.

Public-facing work carries a greater imperative to talk across, rather than down. It prompts thinking inside and outside at once. Faculty members like to say that research informs our teaching and vice versa, but the synergy that public humanities work brings has in some ways, for me, been more transformative. Public humanities work has fostered risk taking. It convinced me to try out new, and even weird, things. It inspired me to take my research in different directions and to write a book on Austen’s reception history that takes seriously the cultural, political, and educational contributions of those outside the academic and cultural elite (Looser, Making). JASNA’s audiences were the impetus to my noticing blind spots in scholarly histories of Austen’s reception and to digging in to evidence most critics had wrongly dismissed as lightweight. Janeites helped me resee how previous scholars had fallen short, how we’d glossed over significant parts of the historical record.

My involvement with JASNA had other unanticipated practical, positive effects. Through speaking about Austen to nonacademic groups, and by writing for JASNA’s publications, I’d inadvertently been gathering a wider audience for my public-facing writing.³ When academics talk about a desire to write a crossover book, we often imagine that so-called general readers will simply pop up out of nowhere to find our work. I’d already crossed over to connect. Some of those connections became close friends. I am grateful to be a part of that community, too.

The Anatomy of a Pitch

How do you decide if a public-facing scholarly path is for you? Having certain personal qualities and aspirational goals will make the decision easier. It helps to like the unfamiliar, because the learning curve can be steep. Public-facing scholarship is a good path for those who enjoy meeting and talking to people who don’t have PhDs. It is not a good fit for people who enjoy making others feel small or preening about their intellectual superiority. It’s a good fit if you can think flexibly about ideas, audiences, and genres, because you’ll need to learn to speak and write in new ways. One of those ways is pitching. The former journalists and entrepreneurs among our academic ranks know this well. It, too, deserves to be demystified by more of us.

Pitching involves reaching out to editors with an idea for a piece of writing (or voice or video), in whatever way their editorial directions stipulate, to try to persuade them that the idea provides fresh, timely content that’s a good fit for their publication or venue. Editors either accept or reject your piece or, as often happens, ignore your message. (No sense getting angry about being ignored. Follow up once, then move on.) To become better at writing a pitch, you need to practice distilling your ideas into short, accessible chunks that crystallize why anyone who doesn’t do what we do ought to care.

To learn how to pitch, I recommend the online resources of the OpEd Project (www.theopedproject.org). The OpEd Project’s mission is to increase women’s and other underrepresented voices in mainstream media, but its advice works for anyone. If you can convince institutional administrators to bring the OpEd Project’s team to your campus for a workshop, then do.⁴ The project’s preliminary data suggest that women make up just ten percent of op-ed contributors in major newspapers. That number may be explained, in part, by women constituting little more than ten percent of those who pitch to editors (“FAQs”). The message is clear: if you want to publish more public-facing pieces, then you need to pitch more often. (Colleagues who are successful grant writers will tell you this principle applies equally there.)

A pitch describes what you are writing and why it needs to get in front of that specific set of readers. You have to get the editor’s attention, in a paragraph or two. This is not the place to situate your work among that of others or to describe the gaps that it allegedly fills. The pitch needs to stand on its own. A claim to originality is great—discoveries are worthy—but boring discoveries happen all the time, too. You have to make it clear that this idea or insight or discovery is interesting and that its findings are timely. In the endnotes I’m including an actual cold pitch I wrote for a piece that ended up in Salon.⁵ After the pitch, I closed my message with a sentence describing who I am and where I previously published, saying I looked forward to hearing back. I’m still learning how to pitch. I invite others to share their successful pitches with colleagues.

I tried to make my pitch enjoyable to read, while explaining how my research findings on the literary past connect to the present—a hook. I tried to match the pitch’s tone and diction to the writing in Salon, after having read lots of its articles. Before pressing send on my pitch e-mail, I’d set up my own ad hoc system of peer review, running the piece by my trusted expert-friends who read it for red flags and errors. It was about a week before I heard back from the editor.

If you want to publish essays in popular periodicals, then you’ll need to become less possessive of your prose. I’ve had editors aggressively slash and flat-out change my content, expecting I’d accept the changes. (I usually do, because good editors have an expert sense of the perceived needs of their particular audience; the majority of editors are good ones.) Once your editor decides when to run your piece, you work to that deadline. “By the end of the day” means 5:00 p.m. in the editor’s time zone. Give the editor your cell phone number. Answer e-mails immediately. I didn’t understand, and should have, that editors write headlines. The author’s suggested headlines are often nixed. If that’s going to infuriate you, then you may want to stick to publishing blog posts. With a blog, you’ll need to build your own connections to readers, but you’ll have editorial control.

Publishing in public-facing venues means increased visibility, which has pleasures and pains. I now get e-mails from strangers asking strange questions. Some are charming. I was recently contacted by a woman in Korea asking me to settle a ten-thousand-won bet with her husband over a line from Pride and Prejudice. Her husband turned out to be more right, but I encouraged him to treat her to a beverage with his winnings, because he obviously had a clever spouse with whom he is having interesting conversations. It was my first marital dispute resolution e-mail. Occasionally, I get messages from someone telling me that reading my work meant something to them. That means a lot to me in turn. It also makes me vow to send out more such gratitude-filled messages to fellow authors. All of us who put ideas out in the world appreciate learning when those words make a positive difference with readers.

It’s important to acknowledge that not all interactions with readers, listeners, or viewers are pleasant. An Atlantic essay I published prompted one commenter to opine that I should be fired from my job. (I no longer read the comments.) I’ve had readers publicly and privately take issue with my judgments. These are pretty standard happenings. They come with the territory.⁶ The more readers who see or hear your words, the more likely it is that some will find them deeply and personally harmful. In the end, these negative comments are rarely more cutting (or more constructive) than the worst of the signed book reviews or anonymous manuscript reviews I’ve received from colleagues over the years, even if more public and less polite. One way I try to keep those naysaying voices out of my head is to concentrate  instead on the people who say they have found my work meaningful. Getting ideas that you care about—and that you worked hard to create—before more eyes and ears gives your work new potential for impact. That’s worthwhile. Stay focused.

In The Value of the Humanities, Helen Small offers core reasons for doing public-facing work. She argues for the distinctiveness of the humanities in being tied to human subjectivity, for their ability to preserve and interpret culture, for their contribution to individual and group happiness, and for their vitality in maintaining democracy and keeping it healthy. She notes, too, that the humanities are a good, in and of themselves, with or without public notice (174–75). The latter argument—humanities for humanities’ sake—is perhaps the most difficult position to communicate to a wider audience.

But none of these arguments will be winning ones if the only people we’re trying to communicate them to are part of the less than two percent of the United States population with a doctoral degree, the thirteen percent with any advanced degree, or the thirty-five percent who’ve earned a bachelor’s degree (America). If we believe in the value of the humanities and want them to have a future, then more of us need to serve as ambassadors to audiences beyond these degree-attainment cohorts. We need to regularly seek public connections—to find or create them.

There’s every reason to approach public humanities work with joy and a sense of positive possibility. One good reason for that approach is that, in taking it, we’re more likely to inspire others. How can we expect to move an audience if our underlying message is, “You don’t understand me? You’re not interested in what I have to say? That’s your problem.” It’s one reason I make it a point to reread regularly Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Her work inspires me to try harder and do better.

Where our scholarly research is concerned, it’s got to be about more than telling our truths and sharing our findings with those we assume are most like us. We must also sometimes seek to gain a fair hearing beyond the confines of our classrooms, journals, and professional organizations. Skeptical colleagues in cocktail conversations may never be won over, and that’s a macro-shame—for them. But I’m confident that as more of us take unapologetic joy in sharing our public-facing research, the influence of the diehard academic skeptics who deny its value will dwindle. For the rest of us, then, our numbers and our power—inside and outside the academy—must grow.

Notes

1. There are initiatives in progress devoted to changing how academic structures evaluate public-facing work in the humanities. See, for instance, “Outcomes.” I’m grateful to Teresa Mangum for bringing these initiatives to my attention and for the public humanities leadership she provides as director of the University of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

2. Thanks to Ruth Perry for reading this section of my essay in draft, sharing her memory of this day, and approving of my quoting her in this way. We remember the day similarly.

3. This is similar to what Susan Perabo has written about realizing that her past students have become an audience for her writing.

4. The MLA sponsored one such workshop in 2017, led by the founder of the OpEd Project, Katie Orenstein. I attended, and it was invaluable.

5. Here is an example of an actual pitch I wrote: “Dear Erin Keane: I’m writing to pitch a piece, ‘Jane Austen, Prim or Porn?’ Is Jane Austen best suited to prim tradition or racy porn? She used to be sold to readers as the most vanilla of marriage endorsers, but in some circles, she’s been reborn as the Melissa McCarthy of classic novelists. The BBC’s wet-white-shirted hunk heroes usually get the credit—or blame—for the explosion of Austen erotica. That’s hardly the beginning of the story. Making sense of Austen’s rebirth as literary history’s hilarious best horny girlfriend requires grappling with a further shade of grey: the slow, successful rise of Austen-inspired porn, which predated them all.

My piece unmasks the identity of the author who first turned Austen into print porn in 1980. He wrote under a female pseudonym, but his given name is perfect for porn. The piece describes him and his Austen-inspired smut, following it forward on a trail to today’s satirical and serious porn efforts, from The Jane Austen Kama Sutra to Spank Me, Mr. Darcy. Whatever you might think of it, today’s spate of Austen porn is shifting how we read her original fiction, making it more difficult for readers to see her cigars as ever just cigars, so to speak. But Porn Austen’s longevity alone, and its becoming less rather than more shocking as it’s evolved, suggests that its supposedly ruinous influence on her reputation is puffed up.”

This piece was eventually published as “Fifty Shades of Mr. Darcy.”

6. Many academics have endured far worse repercussions in sharing their research findings. I believe these situations remain rare, albeit not rare enough. If you’re concerned about whether your public-facing work will put your job or career prospects at risk (and if you’re not deliberately setting out to risk them), then consult a campus-based mentor. Institutional priorities and politics vary so widely that one can’t really offer generalities here, except to say that if you’re worried, then maybe you’re right to be.

Works Cited

America Counts Staff. “Number of People with Master’s and Doctoral Degrees Doubles since 2000.” United States Census Bureau, 23 May 2019, www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-people-with-masters-and-phd-degrees-double-since-2000.html.

Barreca, Regina. They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor. Penguin, 1992.

Berman, Jennifer. Adult Children of Normal Parents. Pocket, 1994.

———. Why Dogs Are Better Than Men. Pocket, 1993.

Bérubé, Michael. Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. Verso, 1994.

Draxler, Bridget, and Danielle Spratt. Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice. U of Iowa P, 2019.

“FAQs: Q. What Is the Actual Submission Ratio of Men to Women?” The OpEd Project, www.theopedproject.org/oped-basics/#faqs. Accessed 6 May 2019.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Hayes, Chris, and Tressie McMillan Cottom. “Why Is This Happening? Talking ‘Thick’ Descriptions with Tressie McMillan Cottom.” Think / NBC News, 6 Feb. 2019, www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/talking-thick-descriptions-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-ncna967286.

Looser, Devoney. “Fifty Shades of Mr. Darcy: A Brief History of X-Rated Jane Austen Adaptations.” Salon, 16 July 2017, www.salon.com/2017/07/16/fifty-shades-of-mr-darcy-a-brief-history-of-x-rated-jane-austen-adaptations/.

———. The Making of Jane Austen. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017.

———. “The Making of a Public Intellectual.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 Oct. 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/The-Making-of-a-Public/241332.

———. “Writing a Book or Article? Now’s the Time to Create Your ‘Author Platform.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 July 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Writing-a-Book-or-Article-/243911.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.

“Outcomes: 2018 Working Group in New Orleans.” Humanities PhDs and Public Humanities, phdpublichumanities.com/outcomes/?fbclid=IwAR0luTXZe8LDQpLUW9G91_1UV2EZp9CczelFzFhPGdHDFRbzKyJz_mrjYrg. Accessed 6 May 2019.

Perabo, Susan. “‘If It Weren’t for This Pesky Teaching Job. . . .” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 Jan. 2019, www.chronicle.com/article/If-It-Weren-t-for-This/245515.

“Regional Groups.” The Jane Austen Society of North America, 2019, www.jasna.org/about/regions/.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “Lots of Pride, a Little Prejudice.” The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/books/jane-austen-society-of-north-america-meets-in-brooklyn.html.

Small, Helen. The Value of the Humanities. Oxford UP, 2013.

Sulloway, Alison. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. U of Pennsylvania P, 1989.