Public Humanities at Yale

Public Humanities supports the fundamental democratic mission of the university, its faculty, students and publics.  We aim to make the public work that faculty and students do as visible as possible within and outside the university through a website that makes legible faculty interests and courses, regardless of distinctions in disciplines or departments.  We offer a series of courses and public programs, including an ongoing podcast series, support both student and faculty public projects and provide teaching opportunities for graduate students.  We offer a certificate credential in Public Humanities, though we are not a department.  We also seek to support the expansion of academic discourse beyond the confines of the classroom, academic publishing, and the academic conference circuit.  By cultivating a dialogue with specialists in non-academic areas, students earning a Certificate in Public Humanities are prepared for public intellectual work such as museum and gallery installation, documentary film and photography, and oral/community history.  Our mission is to expand the concept of “audience” by building bridges to a wide range of local and regional institutions and their respective publics.

The mission of Public Humanities is fivefold:

1.  To offer students an expanded curriculum in the methods, practices, and skill sets associated with the Public Humanities.

2.  To cultivate and articulate best practices for collaborative and creative scholarly work.  Of course all scholarship is collaborative and creative, though these aspects are too seldom foregrounded in our formal scholarly discussions or in graduate training.

3.  To create new venues for intellectual work, both within Yale and across the city and the region.

4.  To create new venues for non-academic expertise within Yale, and thus,

5.  To create new conversations and to cultivate new relationships with contiguous institutions throughout the region (museums, libraries, archives, galleries, media outlets, historical societies, performance troupes, etc.) and with non-academic individuals who have much to offer in an academic setting (artists, photographers, curators, broadcast journalists, film makers, writers, etc.).

Distinct areas of focus beneath the broad umbrella of Public Humanities at Yale include Museums and Collections, Documentary Studies, Digital Humanities, Space & Place, History & the Public, Arts Research, and Public Writing.