Our past events…
11/4/16 When is Public Art Public Humanities?
NU Pub Hum member Margaret Lebron led a discussion on Julie Ellison’s essay “Lyric Citizenship in Post 9/11 Performance” and her account of poet and performer Sekou Sundiata’s “The America Project” to explore the potentials of turning cultural products into cultural projects. How can public art and performance practices encourage and shape a civically engaged public?
10/14, 16, & 19/15: Planning Sessions
Co-chairs Ruth and Liz hosted a series of listening/brainstorming/planning sessions with group members, new friends, and curious interlopers to take the temperature of the group and carve out questions for the remainder of the school year.
10/5/15: “Alt-Ac Talk Back”
In Summer 2015, Humanities Without Walls organized its first Alternative Academic Career Workshop for pre-doctoral students in the humanities. To kick off our school year, we gathered in the Alice Kaplan Institute for Humanities and hosted a panel of workshop participants, including Ira Murfin (NU – Theater and Drama), Kantara Souffrant (NU – Performance Studies), Bill Hutchison (University of Chicago – English), Robert Smith III (University of Minnesota – American Studies), Tyler Miller (University of Illinois at Chicago – History), and Kei Hotoda (University of Illinois at Chicago – Philosophy), along with a workshop organizer, Ian Blechschmidt (NU – Rhetoric and Public Culture), who helped plan the workshop while a fellow at the Chicago Humanities Festival. In a conversation facilitated by Ruth Martin, the panelists discussed what attracted them to the workshop, what they did during it, and what they’re taking from it – take-away’s that included everything from “do informational interviews,” to deeper knowledge of viable non-/para-/alt-academic career paths, to reinvigorated interest in their dissertation projects.
Northwestern students interested in applying for the 2015-16 workshop can find more information here: http://
“…trying to figure out what would make us happy…our intellectual passions…our ethical concerns…and what would pay the bills.” – a workshop participant
7/8/15 – Pub Hum at a Pub
NU Pub Hum members gathered at Moody’s Pub to catch up and talk future plans.
5/29/15 – What Is the ‘Value’ of the Humanities?
For the final meeting of NU Pub Hum for AY 2014-15, we read Judith Butler’s essay on the language of the “value” of the humanities, “Ordinary, Incredulous,” from the Peter Brooks edited volume The Humanities and Public Life (2014).
“My point will not be that we need to refine our skills of critical dismantling, but rather I wish to link our critical practice to an ethical consideration of the forms of cultural aliveness and destruction for which we are compelled to struggle because they are linked with public questions of what is of value, and what should be.” – Judith Butler
4/17/15 – What Is ‘Alt-Ac’ Anyway?
Picking up a conversation that began informally online, NU Pub Hum member Kara Johnson (English PhD candidate) organized a lively panel of current NU grad students and recent alums to discuss the many permutations of the “alt-ac” label – professional benefits and consequences included.
4/3/15 – How Can Digital Archives Be Public Humanities? A Conversation with Harris Feinsod
NU Pub Hum member Ira Murfin (Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama candidate) invited Harris Feinsod, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at NU, to present his Open Door Archive project and discuss the “public” nature of digital archival work. Open Door Archive is a digital repository and exhibition space dedicated to the print worlds and multimedia archives of multiethnic poetry in the Americas and beyond.
2/26/15 – What Is ‘Experiential Learning’ in the Humanities?
NU Pub Hum member Jordana Cox led a discussion of “experiential learning” in the humanities (in traditional college classrooms and beyond) with colloquium co-chair Liz McCabe, who teaches interdisciplinary humanities courses in Chicago Field Studies, the internship program of Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at NU.
1/20/15 – Is the Public Lecture Public Humanities?
Co-Chair Ruth Martin organized a conversation about the role of dissemination and exchange in the public humanities featuring NU Pub Hum member Ian Blechshmidt, (PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Public Culture) about his work with the Chicago Humanities Festival. To prepare for the conversation, we read “Popular Philosophy and the Democratic Voice: Emerson in the Lecture Hall” from English professor Thomas Augst’s work The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth Century America (2003) and “Dialogue and Dissemination” from John Durham Peters’s Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999)…
“…at once a critique of the dream of communication as the mutual communion of souls, a genealogy of sources and scenes of the pervasive sense that communication is always breaking down, and a reclamation of a way of thinking that avoids both the moral privilege of dialogue and the pathos of breakdown.” – John Durham Peters
A graduate of the Public Humanities doctoral program at Brown, NU Pub Hum member Elena Gonzales discussed the state of the field, what it means to be trained as a practitioner of public humanities, and her project on curatorial work for social justice, as well as her work with the National Museum of Mexican Art.
5/16/14 – The Scholar in Public: A Symposium on Public Humanities
Our first major colloquium event, this half-day symposium featured a series of conversations between scholars and other public humanities professionals and visionaries from across the Chicago area. Click the link for more detail.
4/10/14 – Reading Group: “The Future of the Humanities” & The Work of Art in the World
At the inaugural NU Pub Hum reading group, we discussed “The Future of the Humanities – in the Present and in Public” (Daedalus 2009) by Kathleen Woodward and Doris Sommer’s The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014).
“Humanities-inspired ventures…are restructuring curricula in Engaged Humanities programs, also in medical schools, even in fledgling programs in Public Leadership. Evidently, the humanities have important work to do in these and other collaborations throughout universities and civic institutions. Civic life depends on aesthetic training to develop imagination and judgment. This training in free thinking is normally what humanists say they do. It’s a good start.” – Doris Sommer
