May 2025 Public Humanities

A monthly newsletter from the Department of Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona.

May 07, 2025

In this issue:

Calls for proposals
Upcoming events
Publication and project news
May spotlight: Q&A with Georgetown’s 2024 cohort of graduate students in ENPH
Employment and funding opportunities

If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to our Substack (for free!) so that you receive the newsletter in your email inbox and don’t miss any news in the future. We also encourage you to submit items to share. If you have any questions or would like to connect about the newsletter, please email Giulia Negretto at giulianegretto@arizona.edu.

Call for Proposals

HumanitiesX, DePaul University's Experiential Humanities Collaborative, and the Department of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona seek proposals from faculty to present at our annual summer professional development workshop series, “Teaching the Publicly-Engaged Humanities to Undergraduates,” to happen online this July and August. Those selected to present receive a $400 stipend. Those who wish to attend the workshop should check the workshop series page on the HumanitiesX website in early June for the final dates/times. Please see the Call for Presenters for details. Complete the interest form by May 23.
The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) invites paper proposals for a conference on “Atmospheres of the Spiritual” that is planned for December 4-5, 2025 at FAU’s Boca Raton campus. Experienced atmospheres of the spiritual are often powerfully healing to body and mind, while forging connections between individuals and groups. Given their importance, their elusiveness, and their variety of forms and contexts (from religion to nature and art), the conference will explore atmospheres of the spiritual to improve our understanding of what they are, how they function, how their effects might be measured, and how they might be designed and deployed to improve our lives and world. The conference is open to contributions from diverse disciplinary perspectives in the humanities (including medical humanities), social sciences, and the arts. Please email your abstract (250-300 words) and CV to shuster1@fau.edu and to bodymindculture@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is August 30, 2025. Notifications of acceptance are planned for September 30th, 2025.

Upcoming Events

The Rare Book School (RBS) at the University of Virginia is thrilled to announce the lineup for its 2025 Summer Lecture Series. All lectures will take place at 5:30 p.m. ET and are free and open to the public. Each talk will be followed by a reception in UVA’s Edgar Shannon Library Room 230 (RBS Suite). This year, for the first time, RBS will also offer an option to attend a livestream of the in-person lectures via Zoom. Learn more here for lecture details, including contacts and registration links for the livestreams.
Strengthening History Communication: Reframing the Value of History and Your Institution is a half-day, live virtual workshop hosted by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), taking place on June 25, 2025, at 1 pm EDT. Drawing on research from AASLH’s Reframing History project, this workshop will help you communicate with public audiences more effectively and build a wider understanding of the value of history and history organizations. This workshop will include an overview of research findings, discussions about major challenges in communicating history with colleagues from around the country, and and an opportunity to begin crafting your own communications materials. Registration is $100 for AASLH members and $150 for nonmembers. Learn more about the event and registration details here.

Projects and Publications

There are a variety of articles of interest to public humanists in the PMLA’s latest issue. “Developing Humanities Perspectives across Disciplines” (Eric Touya de Marenne), for example, takes up the question of how faculty members can use university spaces to train students in the humanities for social impact. de Marenne describes the experience of transforming a business course offered in the French curriculum to explore issues pertaining to gender and economics in Maghrebi and sub-Saharan countries. Similarly, “Theorizing Archival Public Humanities Scholarship and Telling Excellent Stories” (Devoney Looser) highlights the enormous potential that academics hold in accessing archive materials and interpreting unique artifacts to build new, accessible, and revolutionary narratives for the future.
Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Timothy Snyder (Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University) argues in a recent lecture sponsored by the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Interspaces is an open-access journal, created and led by graduate students in and adjacent to Georgetown University’s Engaged & Public Humanities Program. The journal, launched in 2023, publishes engaged and public humanities work that investigates—and often troubles—traditional campus-community borders, responding with a humanistic lens to the everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations of our communities. The journal encourage submissions in a variety of genres and in new, experimental, multimodal ways of composing. Here you can read the recently published Volume II, featuring a diversity of stories and perspectives through refreshing, creative writing experiences. Find out more about the team behind Interspaces in our Q&A below.

May Spotlight: Q&A with Georgetown’s Engaged and Public Humanities Students

Georgetown’s 2024 cohort of graduate students in the Engaged and Public Humanities program are artists, scholars, storytellers, and community advocates. They are determined to make the humanities accessible, inclusive, and impactful through interdisciplinary work and projects such as Interspaces. This month, we are excited to highlight their perspectives as public humanities practitioners with a brief Q&A.

How did you become interested and involved in the Public Humanities?

With everyone coming from different backgrounds, we each bring unique perspectives to Georgetown University’s Master’s in Engaged and Public Humanities (ENPH). We are artists, consultants, students, teachers, fundraisers, podcasters, and activists. But one thing that we all share is our commitment to advancing the work of public humanities. Each of us has been touched in some profound way by works of public art, literature, music, or even projects to recover marginalized communities’ stories that were overlooked by history.

The program at Georgetown pushes us to learn by doing—to become practitioners who continually advance the field with our own perspectives and insights. This is how the idea of Interspaces, our program’s academic journal, became a reality. Interspaces is our way of highlighting what we are learning, the work we are doing, and the voices that deserve attention in our field.

What are some of the challenges involved in your work in the Public Humanities?

Representation and access are two important challenges that Interspaces works to address. For us, representation means including a diverse set of voices, perspectives, and experiences in the pedagogy of engaged and public humanities. We want the field to reflect and respond to the communities and people whom public humanities projects reach, which means ensuring we welcome everyone to the table.

This is why Interspaces prioritizes first-time publishers and diverse media for publication. We want to highlight and support the next thought leaders as they strive to improve our field. Our upcoming volume almost exclusively engaged and collected works from practitioners who have never published something before. We also developed an adaptive peer review process, where we adjusted the rigor of our review based on the content type we were provided—so this upcoming volume will feature everything from creative nonfiction to case studies to a digital scrapbook. It’s a less traditional approach to academic publishing, but we feel it’s just as important.

Our hope is that by breaking down silos and amplifying perspectives, we contribute and inspire others to seek out new forms of knowing and doing public and engaged humanities.

What future directions do you envision for your work as a Public Humanist practitioner(s)?

This is a great question! We’ve actually talked a lot about this as a cohort. Some of us already have established careers, and we’ll use what we’ve learned in this program to find new ways to advance engaged and public humanities work. Some of us are full-time students and see a multitude of paths we can take to support the humanities—from community organizing to racial equity work in arts and culture institutions. But we all hope Interspaces continues to expand the literature available to other public humanists.

Employment and Funding Opportunities

The Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellowship Program application period for the 2025-2026 cohort is open. Imagining America invites applications from graduate students enrolled at an IA Member Institution and with a demonstrated interest in and commitment to public scholarship and/or artistic practice. PAGE Fellows participate in a yearlong working group in support of collaborative art-making, teaching, writing, storytelling, and co-creating knowledge with and within community. Completed applications must be received by midnight (EST) on Friday, May 31, 2025, to be considered. Applicants will be notified of their status by July 5.
The Department of History at Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, invites applications for a full-time, non-tenure-track, Visiting faculty in History appointment for the 2025-2026 academic year, with the possibility for renewal, at the rank of Visiting Assistant Professor (or at the rank of Visiting Instructor if ABD). For this position, the teaching load of four courses per semester will include surveys in US History and upper division courses in US African American History, the History of Sport, and History of Race and Sports. The review process will begin on May 27, 2025, and continue until the positions are filled.
The Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, invites applications for a 1-year post-baccalaureate fellowship in Digital Research for Experimental Humanities. Applicants for this position should be recent Bard graduates (graduation within the past three years) with a demonstrated academic interest in Experimental Humanities. Review of applications will begin as soon as possible and will continue until the position is filled.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) is hiring a Production Assistant to support the work of its publications program, which creates resources for teachers, students, and researchers in language, literature, and related humanities fields. The Production Assistant will work with the head of production on the typesetting, ebook preparation, and printing of frontlist and backlist book publications. As part of the production team, the Production Assistant will also work on the production of the MLA Newsletter, reports, and a range of MLA print and digital projects. Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.
The University at Buffalo Libraries, Buffalo, NY, seeks a creative, collaborative, and self-motivated applicant for the position of Instruction and Collections Archivist in the University Archives. Founded in 1964, the University Archives houses collections significant to the university dating back to 1846, as well as over 200 diverse manuscript collections detailing the history of the surrounding WNY community. The Instruction and Collections Archivist will provide advanced archival primary source instruction and engage with campus communities to increase the University Archives’ presence as a teaching archive. This individual will take the lead in developing instructional programs for students and faculty across disciplines that highlight archival materials within the University Archives. The Instruction and Collections Archivist will form partnerships throughout the university and assist in processing archival collections in accordance with accepted standards and best practices.
The University of Denver's Center for Judaic Studies (CJS) seeks a scholar-teacher and dynamic program-builder with a demonstrated record of academic and/or professional success for a three-year appointment as the Emil & Eva Hecht Visiting Professor of Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies. Qualified candidates with knowledge and experience in the study of historic, modern, and contemporary antisemitism in its many socio-cultural, political, or religious contexts are encouraged to apply. The individual hired to fill this position will teach two Judaic Studies courses focused on Holocaust and antisemitism studies over three academic quarters (September to June) each year of appointment. This position will direct the Center's Holocaust Awareness Institute (HAI) and expand its flagship Survival and Witness online platform. The projected start date for this position is Fall 2025 or Winter 2026 subject to negotiation. Apply by October 1, 2025.

As always, check out the latest postings on the job boards for the National Council on Public History and the American Association for State and Local History, which provide lists of opportunities that might be of interest to those trained in the public humanities.

Interested in careers in scholarly publishing? Check out the Association of University Presses and the Society of Scholarly Publishing job boards.

Interested in careers in museums? Check out the American Alliance of Museums job board.

Interested in careers in archives? Check out the Archives Gig.