Spring 2024 Public Humanities Micro-Credential: Public Writing
Please find the brief application here, due Monday, January 29th: https://forms.gle/a5tiLznwy5vF5hZx6
This micro-credential on public writing, which is limited to 8 graduate students, is taught by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and will meet on Zoom. The brief application is due by Monday, January 29, 2024 and students will be notified during the first week of February.
Here are the dates of the four Zoom meetings. All meetings are from 3pm to 430pm and students must be able to attend all four:
Tuesday Feb 27
Tuesday April 2
Tuesday April 16
Tuesday April 30
Description of the micro-credential: In his collection Lunch with A Bigot: The Writer in the World, Amitava Kumar asks “What divides the writer from the rioter?” This workshop is concerned with exploring how writers can participate in the 21st century world as disturbers of the peace, historians of the present, and makers of art that confronts the pressing issues of our time. We will examine how these issues are confronted by of some of our era’s exemplary cultural critics; interrogate the notion of doing intellectual work “in public”; examine questions of idiom, voice, genre, and style; and analyze how we as writers employ a range of approaches to establish “authority” and build narrative interest on the page (or online). What does it mean to write for a “public audience”? How do we engage in public discourse? How do we maintain analytic rigor and articulate major social issues to an audience beyond our disciplinary homes and to people with varying educational, political, and social circumstances? How do constructions of audience, language, jargon, and expertise function in such writing? What debates do we want the pieces and books we write to enter, and what sorts of cultural, social, and aesthetic interventions do we want them to make?
Beyond our shared readings and discussion, participants will have the opportunity to draft and “workshop” an original piece of prose, drawn from your scholarly research or otherwise, and purposed to reach a “public” you haven’t previously reached.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include “Names of New York,” “Island People: The Caribbean and the World,” and, with Rebecca Solnit, “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.” He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and he has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, and Artforum, among many other publications. He speaks and lectures widely, and currently directs the popular Author Talks series at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Jelly-Schapiro has taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, and NYU, where he is a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge and teaches in the program in Cultural Reporting and Criticism.