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Humanities Expertise and Academia

When the term public humanities first started to appear in the 1980s, it was deployed by academic humanists to push the boundaries of their research and teaching.13 While the broader goal of moving humanistic knowledge and skills among people remains, for academics it has never quite evolved beyond the academy. Susan Smulyan, a historian and former director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, writes that the public humanities are collaborative, emerging specifically in collaboration between professors and students and between the university and the surrounding community.14 Smulyan also describes a more expansive public humanities as a process undertaken by collaborative groups, including university-level humanists, “with communities outside the campus.”15 While this second understanding of the public humanities nods more to the process of cocreation, it still draws a distinction between higher education and community-based groups without making space for humanistic discovery that involves no university faculty, staff, or students. Like other humanities scholarship, the public humanities create new knowledge; however, academic notions of the public humanities position the public as passive recipients of that knowledge rather than as active participants in its creation, leaving the knowledge creation to people deemed experts by virtue of their academic expertise.

Similar ideas are expressed in a white paper on the subject produced by the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium in 2015.16 At first the paper’s authors appear to be more aligned with the state and jurisdictional humanities councils in how they conceptualize the public humanities: “Public humanities strives to locate, cultivate, and build upon commonalities through broadly collaborative practices of story-telling; of historical inquiry, recovery and acknowledgment; and of artistic expression.”17 However, they continue with the notion that the public humanities embarks on these activities in an effort to recommit the American university to its publics and to serving as a community resource through its public-facing work. The authors note that one reason for urging this recommitment is the underutilization of higher education cultural capital in forging new community partnerships and allowing for space to challenge traditional concepts of expertise. While this is an important role that colleges and universities have played in public humanities work, only in academic definitions of this work is this kind of relationship centered.

The journal Public Humanities—launched in 2024—was founded as a space for specialists and nonspecialists alike to connect over and share humanistic knowledge. An open access journal featuring accessible writing, its stated mission is to create a venue for sharing knowledge about the intersections of humanities scholarship and public life. However, the journal’s mission foregrounds “broader engagement across and outside the academy and to facilitate cross-disciplinary conversations.” Additionally, the journal’s stated value of education specifies sharing knowledge, “especially back and forth across the academia/public boundary.” When discussing engagement, the journal’s values highlight “scholars who transcend traditional academic spaces to engage with society in active and new ways.”18

Traditionally, the word scholar has been employed to mean someone with an advanced degree affiliated with an academic institution, a definition that aligns with the values expressed by Public Humanities. Often as part of their grantmaking or other activities, humanities councils will require the involvement of what they variously call a humanities scholar, expert, professional, or advisor. While the councils are clear that who typically counts as a scholar is someone with an advanced degree (e.g., M.A., Ph.D.), they explicitly make room for other forms of expertise. This was not always the case. As affiliates of the NEH and as recipients of significant federal funds for use in grantmaking, the councils have sometimes had to accede to the NEH’s definition of a scholar—which focuses on having an advanced degree in a humanities discipline. The councils’ more expansive definitions, which tend to be more responsive to the communities with whom they work, are today much more common.19

The West Virginia Humanities Council includes “community member[s] with extensive and documented life experience in the content area upon which the project is centered” as part of its definition of a humanities scholar.20 Nevada Humanities states that it “recognize[s] that knowledge may be acquired differently in various cultures and value[s] such diversity of experience as consistent with our understanding of the humanities.”21 Other councils look to tribal leaders and culture bearers. North Carolina Humanities acknowledges that a humanities scholar “may have developed a high level of expertise through immersion in a particular cultural tradition.”22 Mass Humanities uses a broader definition of a humanities advisor, noting that “a humanities advisor is recognized by their peers for their expertise, or by a community as a bearer of its knowledge and traditions.”23 Someone with an advanced degree working primarily in a university position would be included under these guidelines, but so, too, would persons who possess other forms of expertise.