November 2025 Public Humanities
A monthly newsletter connecting publicly-engaged humanities scholars and practitioners across the US (and beyond), hosted by the Department of Public & Applied Humanities at The University of Arizona.
In this issue:
Upcoming events
Publications and project news
November spotlight: Q&A with Dr. Michelle May-Curry
Employment and funding opportunities
If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to Substack, a free app, to receive the newsletter in your email inbox and not miss any future news! 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.
Upcoming Events
The National Humanities Center invites participants to an illuminating webinar on November 6, 7:00-8:30 PM ET, featuring hydrologist and scholar Ryan E. Emanuel and his work On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice. Emanuel examines how Indigenous communities in eastern North Carolina confront colonialism, resource extraction, and climate change, highlighting stories of resilience and stewardship that redefine environmental justice, science, and public engagement. Register here for free to attend the webinar.
On Wednesday, November 12, 12noon-1:15 PT / 1-2:15pm MT / 2-3:15pm CT / 3-4:15pm ET, the Tools for the Undercommons virtual speaker series continues with featured guests Paisley Rekdal, former Utah Poet Laureate, and author-publisher Hannah Moushabeck. Inspired by Harney and Moten’s concept of “study” as an ongoing, collective form of intellectual and creative exchange, this salon-style series gathers artists, scholars, and cultural workers to share field-tested tools — strategies, theories, methods, and more — that foster meaningful research and artistic intervention. Organized by professors Jacqueline Jean Barrios and Harris Kornstein through the Imagining America Collaboratory, the event highlights how creative work can transform communities and institutions alike. Register for free here.
Publications and Project News
Call for Participation: Help AAR Understand Public Scholarship in Religion. The Publicly Engaged Religion Mapping Project is a collaborative initiative of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. Its goal is to document the landscape of publicly engaged scholarship on religion in North America—enhancing its visibility, sustainability, and connectivity. ACLS and AAR invite scholars, practitioners, and community partners to contribute examples of their public scholarship through a brief (10–15 minute) survey. Drawing on AAR’s Guidelines for Supporting and Evaluating Public Scholarship in Religion, the project welcomes a wide range of work: public presentations (lectures, festivals); public writing (books, articles, blogs); scholarship for specific contexts (policy briefs, consulting, testimony); digital and multimedia projects (exhibitions, podcasts, visualizations); and collaborative research with community or non-academic partners. Survey responses will inform a searchable database and visual map, highlighting innovative models of engagement and strengthening networks that connect religion scholarship with the broader public.
Project Tulsa: Between People and a Place is a documentary initiative of the National Humanities Center that investigates Tulsa as a site of intersecting cultural, historical, and spatial narratives. Filmed in spring 2024, the project convenes scholars, artists, educators, and community leaders whose conversations reveal the city’s entanglements of race, memory, and identity. From the Greenwood District to Cherokee Nation leadership, Project Tulsa traces how communities articulate belonging and resilience in the aftermath of historical disruption, situating Tulsa within broader humanistic inquiries into place, history, and collective transformation.
Michigan State University Press is proud to announce the upcoming release of Public Humanities: Engaging Community, Empowering Civic Discourse, and Reshaping Academia edited by Molly Todd and Jason E. Cohen. This timely collection explores how engaged public scholarship is transforming the humanities. Through diverse case studies, it reexamines education, challenges dominant historical narratives, and amplifies marginalized voices reshaping collective memory. Highlighting projects on place, environment, and civic engagement, the volume underscores the power of relationships and collaboration in creating new public spaces for dialogue and learning. The volume will be available for purchase from MSU Press on December 1.
November Spotlight: Q&A with Dr. Michelle May-Curry
Michelle May-Curry is Curator for DC’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities and is core faculty in Georgetown University’s MA in Engaged and Public Humanities. From 2020-2023 she was Project Director of Humanities for All at the National Humanities Alliance, and was the founding author of this Public Humanities Newsletter. In this role she co-edited The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship alongside Daniel Fisher Livne. This month, we are excited to highlight her perspectives as a public humanities practitioner via a brief Q&A.
How did you become interested and involved in the Public Humanities?
While conducting doctoral research at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, I sat handling photographs with white gloves that felt too precious and urgent to be left in a dark archival basement. Bless our archivists and librarians who keep our material culture safe, but in that moment I became a lover of efforts to bring the archive into the light of public access. I raced towards training myself in exhibitions and curation, which felt most aligned with my interest in photography and visual culture archives.
I was also lucky to be encouraged to explore the public humanities early on in my doctoral program at University of Michigan in American Culture. I was mentored by a holy trinity of public intellectuals — Tiya Miles, Kristin Hass, and Evelyn Alsultany — who each think about archives expansively and who see the public as essential to their research. Summer programs like Humanities Without Walls gave me the professionalization binoculars to see the different paths in front of me. The real “Aha!” moment, though, was when The Carr Center in Detroit gave me the opportunity to turn one of my dissertation chapters into an art installation in a “lab” type setting with other artists, writers, and curators.
What are some of the challenges involved in your work in the Public Humanities?
My work in public art and the public humanities requires cultivating wildly different styles of collaborative relationships. In both, the quality of your partnerships is paramount, but the who of those collaborations differs.
In public art, an artist’s key relationships include those with building developers, city officials/politicians, curators, fabricators, business owners, private collectors, even crane operators. Money is either private and nimbly distributed or inextricably tied to government funding. The art is also meant to speak for itself, with little context beyond an artist’s biographical panel text (affectionately called a “tombstone”) for its audiences.
A humanist’s relationships in contrast might be with librarians, event or classroom participants, accessibility coordinators, university centers, website developers, and grant writers. Funding is often tied to multiyear grant lines or research funds, and very rarely does it come from private or corporate sources. The work’s meaning is also explicitly stated as part of the project itself.
In just reading the differences in these partnership styles, hopefully you can see how a style of working that might succeed for a public artist might fail for a public humanist, and vice versa. The common goal, of course, is often the same: building shared meaning alongside people interested in seeing culture endure.
What future directions do you envision for your work as a Public Humanist practitioner?
At the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (CAH) I serve as curator of the DC government’s fine art collection, exhibitions and gallery space, and manage several grant programs for artists and curators. I am also a writer and professor, and feel lucky to be core faculty in Georgetown’s MA in Engaged and Public Humanities. I love this work, and I look forward to continuing with it. At Georgetown, seeing the program grow into a department (with an accompanying undergraduate major, graduate concentration, and tenure lines) would be exciting. At CAH I hope to make our collection accessible to K-12 audiences and non-university researchers, and am working with my team on a website revamp and curricular development plan.
I similarly only see large collaborations for myself moving forward. While this is certainly changing, the humanities is one of the few remaining fields in academia that does not predominantly operate from a “laboratory” model. Collaborative writing is also rare, with the scholarly monograph reigning over all other forms. I would love to write a book (or curate an exhibition) with my colleagues at Georgetown; not an edited volume, but a singularly voiced humanistic text.
Employment & Funding Opportunities
The Department of History at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, is seeking an Assistant Professor in Public History. This tenure-track position requires a 3-3 teaching load with an expectation of research and service. The position is a tenure-track academic year appointment (10 month). Screening of applications begins December 1, 2025 and continues until the position is filled.
The Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) at University of Toronto, invites applications for its 2026-27 Critical Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship. This 12-month, residential fellowship (July 1, 2026–June 30, 2027) supports early-career scholars whose research engages the theme “Doubles, Doppelgangers” through a critical digital humanities lens. Fellows receive a stipend of CAD $73,258 plus benefits. Apply here by November 25, 2025.
The School of Visual Arts and Design (SVAD) in the College of Arts and Humanities (CAH) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) invites applications for a 9-month, tenure-earning, Assistant Professor in Emerging Media, Animation & Visualization. The position is located at the UCF main campus and is anticipated to start in August 2026. This position is open until filled.
The Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, seeks an experienced scholar and leader with a commitment to interdisciplinarity to serve as Department Chair at the rank of full professor or associate professor. The Chair will be responsible for developing and supporting new departmental initiatives as well as ongoing efforts to foster innovative interdisciplinary research and advance graduate and undergraduate program success. The position will remain open until filled, and review of applications will begin December 1, 2025.
The Department of History & Philosophy at Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, is now accepting applications for a full-time, tenure track faculty position as Assistant Professor of Public History, with a preferred start date of August 2026. Apply by November 12, 2025, for full consideration.
The College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts (PVFA) at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, invites applications for a full-time, nine-month, tenure-track appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor in Performance & Visual Studies, beginning in Fall 2026. Ideal candidates engage with visual/performance cultures through lenses like environmental humanities, Global South, AI, and tech studies. Interdisciplinary collaboration across arts, humanities, and sciences is encouraged. Review begins late November and continues until position is filled.
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.