Public humanities often require an expert in one area to learn another field or skill on-the-fly or to collaborate effectively across boundaries of specialization. Fear of the unknown combines with taken-for-granted assumptions about standard forms of humanities work to prevent our pursuit of promising public humanities projects and careers. Even veteran scholars with expertise important to public life shrink when going outside the comfort zone of academia to engage with audiences via new formats and professional pathways. A recognition of this need to upskill has emerged from a recent surge of research on public humanities in practice. This comic introduces The How-To Issue of Public Humanities, which provides instruction manuals for doing public humanities, meeting people where they are via media, formats, and professions that require conceptual understanding of what these new platforms offer and technical training in the nuts-and-bolts of these spaces. The piece identifies four pillars of public humanities (upskilling, teaming, universal design, and authority sharing), maps the phases of a public humanities project (dream, plan, create, improve), provides a toolkit of key concepts and strategies for the field, includes a directory of examples and instruction manuals, and provides guidance for sustainability and evaluation in public humanities.

Drawing on examples and lessons learned from an array of the author’s collaborative exhibit projects, this essay offers a model for making exhibits that a novice can adopt and adapt in a variety of contexts.

We’re writers, artists. We’re intake valves, immersed in paradox and desire, sponging up the mess of our incomprehensible world. We pause and linger in the slop of the creative process; we often, if not always, double back to reimagine and revise. We veer, wait, and witness. Academia, however, requires us to be exhaust valves, combusting fumes to stabilize an industry in crisis, with the humanities being no exception. This is not news. “Publish or perish” is real. Operational. It determines vocational futures through output, quantifiable objects, and line items. Organized by academic milestones (comps, defense, and tenure), the system forces the forfeiting of creativity and complexity to privilege the swift, slick manufacturing of ideas. This article brings together the author’s experience in harm reduction to translate public health to the public humanities. This “how-to” essay isn’t about how to rehab your Humanities Center. It’s about how to center care despite the rapid currents of capital and productivity. Just as principles for harm reduction reject universal definitions and diagnostics, so too do I reject universal (i.e., singular) methods for how to run your Humanities Center. Rather, here I show you how to embrace the multiples: the relapses and revisions.

Scholars writing for mainstream newspapers, magazines, and websites make the world of ideas accessible to people outside the hallowed halls of higher education – how dare you. It disrobes the habits of academic writing and respects the skills of the journalist who can turn complexity into clarity for non-specialist readers. Emphasizing the importance of storytelling, this article includes tips for style and structure in public writing and advice on submitting pieces for publication. Published models and sample process steps provide nuts-and-bolts guidance for academics looking to write for public venues but unsure where to start. Behind these strategies lies a simple truth: public writing works best when subject-matter experts do it themselves.

How do we persuade historians and history students to adjust from their familiarity with longer forms of writing to embark on a policy brief exercise? On the one hand, the need for humanities scholars to engage with policy-makers is arguably more acute than ever, given the gravity of policy choices we face; however, on the other hand, some will understandably resist what they see as the dangers of humanities becoming instruments of centers of policy-making power. We find, in a case study of historians and history students in Australia, that there is considerable willingness to tackle the task of a policy-brief, and willingness to engage with policy-making more broadly. Students who have taken on the task of writing policy briefs have said that it hurts, but they have also found it to be a rewarding and worthwhile exercise. Established scholars have done similarly, arguing that the time is ripe for more humanities scholars to take up the challenge.

The article describes the challenges of running for local political office and explains the significance or political parties, interest groups, and informal support structures created by women to help women and minority candidates win and successfully govern. Additionally, the article addresses a political context where women and minorities face increased concerns about running for political office in a highly polarized environment.

This article explores the concept of partnerships in public humanities as both a process and a vital outcome. Drawing from experiences within a classroom environment, where university students and community members learned and engaged together, we identify three key precepts for sustaining effective community-university partnerships: centering human relationships, leveraging institutionalization, and redistributing risk. These strategies do not aim to avoid the challenges inherent in collaboration but rather use complexities as opportunities for deeper engagement. We argue that community-university partnerships should themselves be viewed as a valuable and meaningful form of public humanities.

How can staging local stories sustain local relationships and community programs? How can community storytelling projects reshape understandings of what research is, does, and for whom? In considering these questions, I draw on my experience facilitating 10+ Voices projects. These community storytelling collaborations collect, weave together, and perform true stories. Focusing on Solidarity Garden Voices (2023), I trace motivating and guiding principles, including 1) centering community knowledges and choices, 2) celebrating programs beyond my (or any individual) control, and 3) presenting insights inside stories of the lives they come from. I ground these principles in lived moments, as this article is both a portrait of what community-centered research can look like and a song about how such research can feel: disorienting, overwhelming, freeing, inspiring, necessary. Shared.

Evidence synthesis is increasingly recognised as an essential element of the provision and use of expert advice in areas of public reasoning and decision-making.1 Synthesis here refers to an authoritative account of the best available knowledge in a field or fields, relevant to a question of policy interest and accessible to all interested audiences. Synthesis as a practice is well established in many areas of science and medicine. Although less frequent in the humanities, recent examples from funders and the British Academy illustrate increasing recognition of its importance.2 This article outlines why synthesis matters and, while pointing to some systemic challenges, shows how it can be done. It illustrates the findings from the literature with practical material from two recent projects led by the authors.

Academic blogging is a digital platform for “doing” knowledge translation in the humanities. Knowledge translation is the process of communicating research outcomes outside academia so the public can benefit. While science communication is widely recognized as a medium for communicating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge with the public, formal mechanisms for knowledge facilitation in the humanities are not as well established. Academic blogging is core to the social value and impact of the humanities, representing an important open access entry point into humanistic scholarly debates. Drawing on a developing literature about academic blogging as well as a survey we conducted with readers, authors, and editors of academic blogs, this article shows how doing knowledge translation with academic blogs can support the three core domains of a university’s mission: research, teaching, and public outreach. With your research, you can use academic blogs to facilitate networking and collaborations; with your teaching, you can use academic blogs as tools to introduce students to a new topic; with public outreach, doing academic blogging enables you to connect with diverse readerships. Academic blogs contribute to knowledge translation for and about the humanities, from foundational concepts to new research and the more hidden aspects of academic practice.

Dubbed “the world’s first and oldest academic social network” by a grant reviewer at the National Science Foundation, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory or “Haystack”) built its first interactive website in 2002. Now, 22 years later, HASTAC has some 18,000 network members, over 400 institutional members, and a thriving graduate-student-led HASTAC Scholars program that selects 100 new student members each year. Co-Director Cathy N. Davidson co-founded HASTAC with David Theo Goldberg and numerous other scholars in the humanities and social sciences working in tandem with computer scientists and programmers. Before Wikipedia, Facebook, or Twitter (now X), HASTAC created an open-access, public network with the purpose of making full use of evolving affordances of technology while also critiquing and seeking to improve issues of access, ethics, gender and racial bias, and social and environmental impact. This essay details what it takes to lead and sustain a dues-free, participatory social network with community standards and collaborative decision-making, and where any network member is invited to blog, post, start dialogues, and lead research initiatives, across institutional and other boundaries.

This essay demonstrates the impact of careful, intentional event design on public humanities programming. In particular, it records the practical and pedagogical methodologies we have developed through a decade of sustained collaboration between a humanities scholar and an arts administrator. We outline the ways that arts administration practices have informed our approach to public humanities, and we suggest that these practices can help us to address skills gaps in graduate training in the humanities. In the essay, we walk through our framework for the intentional design of a public humanities event (the Life Cycle of an Event worksheet) and offer practical advice on further collaboration between humanities practitioners and arts administrators. We have found that when humanities practitioners and arts administrators collaborate, accessibility and inclusivity become central to public humanities program design – an achievable expectation and not just an aspiration. Above all, our collaboration has deepened our commitment to curating relevant public humanities programming that welcomes community members and provides mentorship opportunities for students.

This essay examines the integration of accompaniment methodology with public humanities and policy work through case studies from activist research in New Orleans. The concept of accompaniment involves providing active, supportive engagement alongside marginalized communities to address systemic barriers and foster mutual understandings. This essay highlights how accompaniment can provide support in navigating bureaucratic challenges and inform immigration policy. It also explores how accompaniment can inform public humanities work, like the development of a digital timeline and physical exhibition documenting Black labor history in New Orleans. This approach underscores the transformative potential of combining accompaniment with public humanities to enhance community empowerment, inform policy, and challenge systemic inequities. By engaging with community experiences and integrating insights from both historical and contemporary struggles, this essay chronicles the development of accompaniment methodology and shows how this approach can enrich public humanities scholarship and policy work, creating more inclusive and responsive solutions to social challenges. Accompaniment serves as a vital tool for bridging academic inquiry with social justice, making public humanities research more relevant, ethical, equitable, and impactful.

Public humanities programs have the potential to engage diverse communities, while addressing the employability challenges faced by many humanities graduates. This article outlines how to build a humanities internship program that pays students to collaborate with local governments, museums, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations, on projects for public good. Through these mutually beneficial partnerships, students apply skills – such as writing, archival research, critical thinking, and data analysis – beyond the classroom, demonstrating the relevance of the humanities in real-world contexts. The article discusses key strategies for developing a sustainable program, including networking to build community partnerships, fundraising through small grants, and evaluating impact on all stakeholders. By reflecting on the successes and challenges of such a program, the article highlights the value of public humanities in preparing students for diverse careers while supporting community-driven projects.

Public dissertations allow doctoral students to engage a broader audience that is often already having conversations about our research topics, whether explicitly or not. The traditional dissertation is usually read by the committee (if you are lucky) and the author. Public projects allow early-career scholars to expand their marketability, relate their abstract topics to concrete discussions, and adapt to the changing demands of the academic space. This article includes a brief case study of the author’s public dissertation to suggest possible avenues for current graduate students and faculty mentors, along with a frank discussion about the pros and cons of such a project. Six tips provide a frank discussion of the pros and cons of such a project and possibilities for graduate students interested in a public project to consider.

Navigating a career beyond the traditional academic path can be both exciting and daunting for humanities professionals, often leaving them eager to explore new opportunities but unsure where to start. This article addresses five common challenges faced by those venturing outside academia and offers practical strategies for overcoming these obstacles. By tackling key issues such as translating academic expertise into broader contexts, expanding skill perceptions, and building professional networks, it provides actionable advice to help humanities graduates thrive in diverse career environments. Whether you are struggling with imposter syndrome or looking to leverage your unique skills, this guide aims to empower you to unlock new career possibilities and achieve success beyond academia.

In this article, we reflect on our experiences co-producing a podcast about literary books mostly written by women of color. We describe how and why we started the podcast and how our podcast provides a model of skills that are key to doing humanities, and offer some practical advice about making podcasts.

Public Humanities projects notoriously begin with the bootstrapping commitment of one or two long-suffering and visionary individuals. If they can make it past the turbulent narrows of their beginnings, they often only endure through unrecognized and little-rewarded labor. Gatherings of public humanists can be exercises in commiseration. When you determine that you have enough funding to last one more year, celebration is in order. Such travails naturally lead to the question of how public humanities programs can move beyond being nice extras to become more central to the concerns of our home institutions. How, in short, can the work of public humanists be institutionalized and become part of the everyday humdrum of academic life rather than the desperate scrabbling of the righteous, committed, frantic, and overtired?