In the menu to the left, you will find specific resource pages on funding (at UBC and beyond), our public scholarship toolkits, and a dedicated page focused on graduate students (note: there are also resources on this page for supervisors, department heads, and others who advise graduate students or lead graduate student programs). Below we have compiled a list of readings on public humanities scholarship, tenure and promotion processes, and sample syllabi for publicly-engaged courses. Please feel free to peruse these resources, and let us know if there’s something we should add.
Quick Access
General Readings
“56 Ways to do the Public Humanities.” National Endowment for the Humanities. 18 Feb. 2014. https://www.neh.gov/divisions/fedstate/in-the-field/56-ways-do-the-public-humanities.
Bate, Jonathan, editor. The Public Value of the Humanities. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
Campbell, Kathryn Peltier, editor. Publicly Engaged Scholarship and Teaching, special issue of Diversity & Democracy, vol. 18, no. 1, Winter 2015.
Cooper, David D. Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life. Michigan State University Press, 2014.
“Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship in Language and Literature Programs.” Modern Language Association. Aug 2022. https://www.mla.org/content/download/187094/3025238/Guidelines-Evaluating-Public-Humanities.pdf
Jay, Gregory. “The Engaged Humanities: Principles and Practices for Public Scholarship and Teaching.” Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012.
Krmpotich, Cara. “Public Humanities as Third Space: Memory, Meaning-Making and Collections and the Enunciation of “We” in Research.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 85 no. 4, 2016, p. 82-92.
Lubar, Steven. “Public Humanities and More: Steven Lubar’s Blog.” http://stevenlubar.net/.
Lucas, Kristin, and Pavlina Radia. “Experiential Learning in the Humanities: From Theory to Practice in an After-School Shakespeare Program and an Online Journal.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 17, no. 1, 2017, pp. 129-138.
Small, Helen. The Value of the Humanities. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Smith, Sidonie. A Manifesto for the Humanities. University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Smulyan, Susan, editor. Doing Public Humanities. Routledge, 2020.
Sommer, Doris. The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities. Duke
University Press, 2014.
Woodward, Kathleen. “The Future of the Humanities in the Present & in Public.” Daedalus, vol. 138, no. 1, 2009, pp. 110-123.
On Tenure & Promotion
AAA Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion Review: Communicating Public Scholarship in Anthropology. American Anthropological Association. 2017.
AFS Position Statement on Promotion and Tenure Standards and Review. American Folklore Society.
Ahlberg, Kristin et al. “Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian.” American Historical Association, 2017.
Alperin, Juan Pablo and Stefanie Haustein. “Review, Promotion and Tenure Project.” The Scholarly Communication Lab.
Changfoot, Nadine. “Engaged Scholarship in Tenure and Promotion: Autoethnographic Insights from the Fault Lines of a Shifting Landscape.” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, vol. 26, no. 1, 2020.
Ellison, Julie and Timothy K. Eaton. “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University.” Imagining America, 2008.
Kalleberg, Arne L. “Evaluating Public Communication in Tenure and Promotion.” Footnotes, vol. 44, no. 6, Sep/Oct 2016.
Shipley, Jonathan. Becoming “Community Engaged”: Engaged Scholarship, the Carnegie Foundation, and Tenure and Promotion at R1 Universities, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017.
Winter, Caroline. “The Review, Promotion, and Tenure Project at the ScholCommLab.” Open Scholarship Policy Observatory. 27 Sep, 2019.
Sample Syllabi
The Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage has a public database of over 40 syllabi from various public humanities courses offered through their program.
Undergraduate
McDaneld, Jen. “Making Research Matter: The Public Humanities, Engaged Scholarship, and the U.S. Suffrage Centennial.” https://college.up.edu/prf/files/prf_readingcoursesyllabus.pdf
McGrath, Jim. “Mapping Violence.” https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:30225/
Valk, Anne. “Methods in Public Humanities.” (Grad and undergrad hybrid) https://methodsinpublichumanities.wordpress.com/syllabus/
Graduate
Altman, Michael J. “Foundations: Public Humanities and Religious Studies.” https://blogs.religion.ua.edu/rel502/syllabus/
Bartha, Miriam and Bruce Burgett. “Scholarship as Public Practice.” https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/csp-hum-594-central-resouce-site/home/hum-594-syllabus-2012
ClayComb, Ryan. “Public Literary Humanities.” https://delightandinstruct.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/public-literary-humanities-a-syllabus/
Guyer, Sara. “Public Romanticism and the Public Humanities: A Graduate Seminar.” https://romantic-circles.org/pedagogies/contest/2013.guyer
Lubar, Stephen. “Introduction to Public Humanities.” https://blogs.brown.edu/amst-2650-s01-fall-2017/sample-page/
–. “Museum Histories.” https://stevenlubar.net/history-of-museums/museum-histories-course-spring-2015/
–. “Teaching Exhibitions.” https://stevenlubar.net/uncategorized/teaching-exhibitions/
McGrath, Jim. “Digital Archives and Digital Publics.” https://digitalarchivesanddigitalpublics.jimmcgrath.us/
–. “Digital Public Humanities.” https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:15425/
–. “Digital Storytelling.” http://www.digitalstorytelling2019.jimmcgrath.us/
–. “Topics in Public History: Publics, Projects, and Methods in Digital Public History.” https://digitalpublichistoryfall2020.jimmcgrath.us/
Pendás, María González. “BUILDING PUBLICS: Introduction to Modes and Methods of the Engaged Humanities.” (Art History) http://heymancenter.org/building-publics-introduction-to-modes-and-methods-of-the-engaged-humanitie/
Rizzo, Mary. “Place, Community, and Public Humanities: Programming Environmental Justice.” https://sasn.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/inline-files/Rizzo%20Syllabus%20DRAFT.pdf
Sula, Chris Alen. “Digital Humanities I.” (Library & Information Studies) http://chrisalensula.org/wp-content/uploads/syllabus657-s15.pdf
Valk, Anne. “Methods in Public Humanities.” (Grad and undergrad hybrid) https://methodsinpublichumanities.wordpress.com/syllabus/