Seminar in Special Topics: The Public Humanities

In this class, we will discuss the now long-standing debates over the continued value of the humanities in liberal education and consider the forms and forums through which our own individual creative and scholarly projects can circulate beyond the academy. The course will be divided into two parts:

Part I: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics (roughly 9 weeks) In this section of the course, we will consider the humanities at three different levels: intellectuals, universities and publics. We will begin by looking at the foundational work of Antonio Gramsci on “The Role of the Intellectuals” and his discussion of traditional v. organic intellectuals. We will think about the rise from the late 1980s on of the term “public intellectual” and consider the work of scholars and writers–bell hooks, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Toni Morrison, Edward Said, and Cornel West to name a few. We will examine the role that the humanities play in shaping the political sphere and concomitantly how scholars of the humanities and writers and artists influence political change. We will contextualize our discussion of public intellectuals by historicizing the debates over the utilitarian and non-utilitarian value of the humanities throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. We will analyze how many senior scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, Doris Somer and others argue for the qualitative value of the humanities within a university funding environment that favors STEM over the arts and letters. And turning to the works of Wendy Brown, Toby Miller and Christopher Newfield, we will consider how these debates are taking place at the same time as higher education is being thoroughly restructured such that many public universities now charge tuition that rivals private institutions and the instructional faculty nationwide is now overwhelmingly contract (i.e. contingent or adjunct) labor. How has this restructuring unequally affected access to university education along class and race lines? We will look at the calls for public humanities work and think critically about the “public” or “publics” imagined under such a rubric.

Part II: Developing Public Humanities Programming (roughly 7 weeks):In this section of the course, I will invite scholars to our class who have an extensive background in public humanities programming, including the production and dissemination of digital materials. I also want to include faculty working in the digital humanities initiative on campus. Students will learn about funding for public humanities projects and use NEA and NEH grant applications to develop their own project and serve in teams as review panels for those applications.

Student Learning Outcomes addressed in this course include the following:

Understanding of the discipline of English today and its relationship to other disciplines.

Understanding of advanced research methods and/or creative techniques

Ability to demonstrate advanced critical analysis in both written and oral performance

Ability to map, historicize and contextualize 3 specialized sub-fields.

Assignments

10 minute class presentation on a set of readings in Part I – 10%

10 minute class presentation on either the position paper on the value of humanities or the student’s development of public humanities programming materials – 10%

class postings to Laulima on the readings each week – 20%

grant application and budget for a public humanities project (10 pages maximum) – 20%

reviewer comments on grant applications – 10%

position paper on the value of humanities, or development of humanities programming materials whether in hard or digital format (12-15 pages or equivalent) – 30%

 

Required Texts:

Books to buy through the UHM Bookstore but also available for lower costs through digital formats

Brooks, Peter, ed. The Humanities and Public Life. Fordham UP, 2014; Newfield, Christopher. Unmaking the University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Harvard UP, 2011; Nussbaum, Martha. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton UP, 2012; Sergel, Ruth, See You in the Streets: Art, Activism and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (Humanities and Public Life). U of Iowa P, 2016; Somer, Doris. The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities. Duke UP, 2014.

Additional readings and a course packet will include works by Antonio Gramsci on the role of the intellectuals; Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere and Michael Warner on “counter publics”; Linda Tuiwai Smith, “The Indigenous Peoples’ Project: Setting a New Agenda” and “Getting the Story Right: Telling the Story Well”; work on poets and philosophers in the schools as well as prison education projects; the MLA Task Force Report on PhD Education; readings from Inside Higher Ed and the CHE and other blogs on higher education.