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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can staging local stories sustain local relationships and community programs? How can community storytelling projects reshape understandings of what research is, does, and for whom? In considering these questions, I draw on my experience facilitating 10+ Voices projects. These community storytelling collaborations collect, weave together, and perform true stories. Focusing on Solidarity Garden Voices (2023), I trace motivating and guiding principles, including 1) centering community knowledges and choices, 2) celebrating programs beyond my (or any individual) control, and 3) presenting insights inside stories of the lives they come from. I ground these principles in lived moments, as this article is both a portrait of what community-centered research can look like and a song about how such research can feel: disorienting, overwhelming, freeing, inspiring, necessary. Shared.

Evidence synthesis is increasingly recognised as an essential element of the provision and use of expert advice in areas of public reasoning and decision-making.1 Synthesis here refers to an authoritative account of the best available knowledge in a field or fields, relevant to a question of policy interest and accessible to all interested audiences. Synthesis as a practice is well established in many areas of science and medicine. Although less frequent in the humanities, recent examples from funders and the British Academy illustrate increasing recognition of its importance.2 This article outlines why synthesis matters and, while pointing to some systemic challenges, shows how it can be done. It illustrates the findings from the literature with practical material from two recent projects led by the authors.

“Caste No Bar?” navigates through Kolkata’s upper-caste Hindu Bengali matrimonial landscape and probes the patterns of matchmaking among families seeking brides for NRI (non-resident Indian) grooms. The matrimonial market, I argue, neatly foregrounds everyday casteism. If the parent community in West Bengal harbours a distinguished obsession with caste, the Bengali diaspora transports such caste enthusiasm beyond geographical confines to reproduce and reinforce caste on a global terrain. The apparent liberal progressive image of educated Bengali families with well-educated NRI grooms is grossly denuded in the matrimonial market. Across matrimonial columns and matrimonial websites, most advertisements mention their own caste affiliations; some stipulate preferred caste affiliations of the desired spouse, while many declare “Caste No Bar,” an oft-adduced phrase which adequately disguises the caste-fervour underlining Kolkata’s matrimonial market. Foregrounding the permeating social acceptability of endogamous marriages, this article scouts for the subtext of “Caste No Bar” that permits selective exogamy and precludes most boundary-crossings in a caste-charged matrimonial landscape that tellingly underpins caste bigotry.

Poet Nikki Giovanni’s death rocked scholarly and literary communities. The occasion of her 9 December 2024 death has prompted reflections on the life and legacy across genres and decades. As others write and talk about Giovanni from a purely “scholarly” angle analyzing her body of work, I offer here a glimpse into Nikki Giovanni the person who loved Black people and who welcomed me into her life and friend circle. I punctuate my essay with references to her poetry but mostly underscore her generosity, compassion, and human kindness infused into her creative expressions. Nikki was a poet’s poet beloved by many. Those who leaned into her wit, her unadulterated truth-telling about US racism, Black love, and Black self-love found in her life and work a refuge from worlds that deny, erase, and devalue. She elevated and amplified Black people and Black women specifically and humanity more broadly.

This article examines the transformative power of creative play in enhancing innovation, collaboration, and mental agility within professional and educational settings. It differentiates “creative play” from talent and leisure, arguing that creativity is an essential, learnable behavior. Drawing on personal experiences from the advertising industry and academia, as well as psychological research and case studies, the article illustrates how activities such as artist’s dates, museum visits, and drawing exercises stimulate cognitive flexibility and boost productivity. By advocating for the integration of creative practices into daily routines, it highlights the importance of fostering environments that support creative thinking and adaptability to drive innovation and maintain mental agility in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Academic blogging is a digital platform for “doing” knowledge translation in the humanities. Knowledge translation is the process of communicating research outcomes outside academia so the public can benefit. While science communication is widely recognized as a medium for communicating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge with the public, formal mechanisms for knowledge facilitation in the humanities are not as well established. Academic blogging is core to the social value and impact of the humanities, representing an important open access entry point into humanistic scholarly debates. Drawing on a developing literature about academic blogging as well as a survey we conducted with readers, authors, and editors of academic blogs, this article shows how doing knowledge translation with academic blogs can support the three core domains of a university’s mission: research, teaching, and public outreach. With your research, you can use academic blogs to facilitate networking and collaborations; with your teaching, you can use academic blogs as tools to introduce students to a new topic; with public outreach, doing academic blogging enables you to connect with diverse readerships. Academic blogs contribute to knowledge translation for and about the humanities, from foundational concepts to new research and the more hidden aspects of academic practice.

Mothers of Sierra Leone leverages the power of filmic storytelling to improve maternal health outcomes in Sierra Leone, a country with one of the planet’s highest maternal mortality rates. Since 2019, we have operated as part of Lehigh University’s Global Social Impact program, working with a team of interdisciplinary students to amplify the voices of Sierra Leonean women rather than transmit Western medical expertise. Our project is based on two premises: (1) we will not solve the healthcare crisis in Sierra Leone through technology and (2) women experience better healthcare outcomes when they are confident and comfortable to advocate for themselves. Our focus group and survey data indicate that our filmic storytelling improves women’s confidence to advocate for themselves and increases their knowledge of available health services. Maternal mortality may be one of the most expansive health challenges facing our planet today because we struggle to comprehend or delimit its parameters, including structural and systemic racism, networks of capitalism, insufficient infrastructure, disparate access to medicine, and patriarchal violence. Our failures to tell public, accessible, and equitable stories about maternal mortality exacerbates and often exoticizes this crisis.