The “public turn” in the humanities constellates a moment of critique, identifying literature’s dis-embedded and elite orientations, mostly institutionalized by academics and the reigning world systems. The reified literary space and its ultimate syllabification have completely dematerialized literature, even de-radicalizing postcolonial studies, Black studies, and Dalit studies into dis-embedded academic practices. The questions I pose inquire whether the postcolonial literary enterprise mostly relies on elite “europhonic” expressions of the aesthetic, while ignoring a vast corpus of vernacular and local texts that narrate the struggles and visions of the actual publics and the counterpublics (Fraser 1992 and Warner 2005). The heterodox and subaltern dimensions of the publics—the counterpublics—also expose the conformist and majoritarian character of the publics. This project, therefore, argues for the restoration of the publics in literature while at the same time problematizing the ideological and hegemonic kernel of the category of the publics itself. As the idea of the counterpublics signifies a greater materiality of dissent within the category of the publics, this paper empirically examines the vernacular Sahajiya literature of Bengal (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), which involves the voices of the Bengali counterpublics, including the subaltern Bauls and the Fakirs who embodied the Sufi-Sahajiya or Sufi-Vaisnab heterodox traditions of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

This article suggests directions and approaches for amplifying and deepening the work of the humanities in communities beyond the academy, with specific attention to public readerships and scholarship in literary studies globally. It argues that in the academic humanities, scholars work with materials that resonate with broad public audiences, but the scholarship they produce in their interpretation of those materials—in the case of literary studies, literary texts—does not often enough reach or resonate with wider audiences. Drawing upon the concept of “resonance” as distinctly theorized first by literary critic Wai Chee Dimock and more recently by sociologist Hartmut Rosa, this article describes how scholarship in literary studies might open itself up to the possibility of resonant relationships with readers who are not formally trained in the field but whose thoughtful and deeply held convictions, commitments, and articulations of experience are valuable to the exchange of ideas around which intellectual life is constructed. This article details two possible answers to the methodological question of what would be necessary for the further development of a publicly engaged literary criticism, one emphasizing interpretation as a broadly shared project in the humanities sector and the other focusing on targeted publicly engaged peer review.

The recent proliferation of the digital video essay as a public, personalized, and creative genre on YouTube testifies to the immense popularity of essayistic practices across the globe today. Some of today’s digital video essays from this platform engage in what I call “postscholarly” criticism, which combines the nonprofessional explorations of literary humanities scholarship with personal, social, and public commentary. My essay broadly argues that, by situating academic scholarship in the global digital public domain, today’s author-critics produce self-appointed sites of popular humanities work. To examine the tension between disciplinarity and publicity of postscholarly video essays, I theorize the influences of the academic humanities on today’s author-critics, along with exploring the amateur and public origins of the video essay production. By drawing on relevant examples, I aim to show the salient traits of postscholarly criticism from YouTube, with a focus on its global transmission. Finally, I raise the question of (post-)professionalism within literary public humanities to promote its distinction from today’s popular public practices of criticism. Overall, my essay invites scholars of the public humanities to study the new digital era of postscholarly criticism as a popular phenomenon with significant implications for the literary discipline and beyond.

This article explores the concept of transfer as it emerges in German-speaking academic discourse and considers its broader implications for the Global Public Literary Humanities. While transfer has become an established term in university policy, especially in Germany, its potential for literary studies remains under-examined. Building on both German and Francophone models, this article offers a nuanced framework that distinguishes between transfer and its synonyms—such as application, practice, communication, cooperation, and mediation—and proposes the concept of transferability as a means to sharpen theoretical and practical awareness regarding the conditions for successful transfer. This article presents a model that identifies both enabling conditions (such as relevance and resonance) and practical forms of transfer, arguing that transferability is shaped by ethical, esthetic, and anthropological considerations. Drawing on examples from current German debates (e.g., #RelevanteLiteraturwissenschaft, collaborative literary festivals, and citizen science projects), the analysis demonstrates that successful literary transfer is always co-creative and dialogical. Ultimately, this article calls for more institutional and structural efforts to enable transferability within literary studies and suggests that increased awareness of its prerequisites and possibilities for implementation can make academic work more responsive, inclusive, and socially engaged. This essay also advocates for extending the debate by incorporating concepts and practices from other linguistic and cultural traditions, thereby advancing the vision of Global Public Literary Humanities as a truly interconnected, dynamic, and transformative field. In doing so, this article hopes to encourage further critical reflection, experimentation, and the opening of new perspectives in research, teaching, and public engagement.

I’ve long reflected on how our work in the Blue Humanities (an interdisciplinary water-centric approach) can reach broader audiences, so it becomes meaningful and impactful, rather than buried in academic silos. Water, after all, is universally captivating. It resonates across age groups, cultures, professions, and disciplines. This article examines how the Blue Humanities can advance the Global Public Literary Humanities by engaging broader audiences in urgent conversations about climate change. At a time when the climate crisis demands cross-disciplinary and public engagement, the Blue Humanities offers a unique framework that bridges two persistent gaps: the divide between scientific and humanistic knowledge, and the disconnect between expert science and public understanding. At its core, the climate crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of imagination and communication between the humanities and sciences, as well as between science and the public. Drawing on my experience of teaching the Blue Humanities and using Twitter/X as a platform for public engagement, I explore how narrative tools—such as short fiction, film adaptation, video games, and social media—serve as effective Public Humanities media. These platforms evoke affect, ethical reflection, ecological awareness, and action by translating specialized climate knowledge into shared cultural narratives. They make the invisible climate change visible. By synthesizing blue, public, global, and literary humanities, I argue that narrative forms—whether textual, visual, or digital—can help build a civically engaged, media-diverse literary public capable of confronting the planetary challenges of our oceanic and climate futures.

This article addresses the potentials and shortcomings of prominent current attempts to articulate platforms for public literary humanities. While the pressing polycrises of the twenty-first century call for a resurgence of committed literature—and, accordingly, a public-facing critical practice and ethics—a scenario for public literary humanities still remains to be scripted. We argue that the vagueness of the term “literary value” is one crucial obstacle in this context. It weakens the opposition to literature’s commercialisation and in fact tends to lead to an unproductive reiteration of traditional, canon-bound conceptions of what “good” literature is. We perceive a similarly weak definition of “value” in the public humanities at large, but find in Judith Butler’s encouragement to trust in extra-academic publics a promising perspective that we deem applicable to a budding public literary humanities as well. Drawing on historical (Bertolt Brecht) and current (Vinod Kumar Shukla) examples, we are able to show that such a literary and critical practice can only be conceived when the established notion of literature as private and solipsistic is overcome.

Literary scholars’ expertise is founded on knowledge of a small collection of texts, below which lies the vast realm of archived but long-forgotten literature that Margaret Cohen has called the “Great Unread.” Cohen’s account frames the Great Unread as the exclusive domain of highly trained specialists, while students are, for pragmatic reasons, taught to close-read the established canonical texts. This article argues that there is great value in facilitating the engagement of newcomers with the Great Unread, and in particular, the Global Great Unread. Within a course I created and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I guided undergraduates through exploring the Great Unread of nineteenth-century global periodicals, selecting a short story of interest and creating a digital edition to reintroduce the story to a present-day audience. In crafting editorial materials of various kinds, students independently studied and wrote about global contexts ranging from the linguistic to the cultural to the geopolitical. After the course was complete, students could choose to have their edition published on a website and thus actually become available to a public readership beyond the classroom. Through such initiatives, we can expand our understanding of the ways in which literary scholars and literary study can be valuable to publics on a global scale.

This essay makes a case for the crucial role of performance in higher education as a way to help students become more responsible world citizens. It asserts that a culture of problem-solving rooted purely in metrics is not sufficient to tackle the complex global challenges that we face moving forward. Instead, we need methods for collaboratively assigning value and making decisions that are not beholden to ones and zeros or the market logic of capitalism. Theater—the applied craft of making a world (big or small), an experience (long or short) that’s livable and sharable—offers one place where we can develop these aptitudes.