The University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, whose director Kathleen Woodward has long had an interest in the “public humanities,” has announced a Certificate in Public Scholarship for graduate students at the University of Washington. Might such an institutional structure for humanities training that involves engagement with the public be a model for […]
Public Research Competition 2011 at the University of Alberta
The University of Alberta is running an innovative graduate student competition for ideas and strategies for communicating Arts (Humanities, Social Sciences and Fine/Performing Arts) research to the public. See Public Research Competition 2011 – Faculty of Arts – University of Alberta. The idea is that graduate students get a limited amount of time to pitch […]
Insider Higher Ed: Views: Sorry
Stephen Brockmann has penned an essay for Inside Higher Ed titled Sorry which looks back on the “culture wars” and how the humanities was replaced by vocational programmes while we were arguing over the canon. The battle between self-identified conservatives and progressives in the 1980s seems increasingly like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. […]
What Would It Take to Create a Humanities Journal With the Public Impact of a Science Journal Like Nature?
In a recent post on Research Blogs, Christopher Pressler—Director of Senate House Libraries, University of London—reflects on “whether it is possible, or indeed even wise to start a journal in the humanities that has a similar market profile as Nature‚ the critical and popular science journal.” Nature, he observes, has the following characteristics: Highest prestige […]
Blaming Government, But Not Showing Why They Matter: A Critique of the Humanities
In a reflective opinion piece of 7 January 2011 in the BBC News Magazine, Alain de Botton—“philosopher and writer”—takes a sympathetic, but also sternly critical, view of the plight of the humanities under the threat of “cuts” in the United Kingdom. “If asked to apportion blame for what has happened to their departments,” he says, […]
A Humanities University Goes into Exile for the “Autonomy” to “Think Critically”
As Inside Higher Ed recently reported, the European Humanities University (EHU) “may be unique in the world in that it operates today completely as a university in exile.” Formed in Belarus in 1992, the university was forced to close by its home government in 2004. Subsequently, as EHU’s “About” page says, it “re-launched activities in […]
4Humanities Stipends for International Correspondents
4Humanities is seeking up to three bilingual or multilingual graduate students (or early-career researchers) from outside Australia, Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. who would each receive an honorarium of 450 Canadian dollars (total) for contributing at least one online post per month for a term of one year to the 4Humanities site (https://4humanities.org/). The […]