Public humanities represent a branch of the humanities that emphasises public engagement, striving to render specialised knowledge accessible to a broader audience. Recent scholarly interest in this field has surged, as evidenced by works such as Philip Lewis's The Public Humanities Turn (2024), Daniel Fisher-Livne and Michelle May-Curry’s edited collection The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities (2024), and the forthcoming journal Public Humanities by Zoe Hope Bulaitis and Jeffrey Wilson for Cambridge University Press. These publications, while contributing to the growing endeavour to bridge the gap between academia and society at large, also underscore the expanding scope of public humanities, as the field increasingly seeks to conceive of novel ways to demonstrate the humanities' relevance to contemporary issues, including democracy, ethics, and technology.


Against this backdrop, this seminar will focus specifically on the role of literature in public humanities. We welcome contributions that explore how literary studies can inform and enhance public humanities initiatives. Potential topics could include:

• Definitional and Communication Challenges: Exploring how to better define and communicate the role of literary public humanities in both academic and public sectors.


• Access and Resource Allocation: Addressing issues of access to literary public humanities resources and the equitable distribution of funding and support.


• Community-Led Humanities: Examining models where public humanities work in literature is led by communities rather than solely by academics or cultural institutions.


• Public Humanities and Digital Media: Investigating the impact of digital media on literary public humanities and how it can be leveraged to reach wider audiences.


• Interdisciplinary Approaches: Encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations that bring together literature, history, philosophy, and other humanities disciplines to address contemporary issues.


• Global Perspectives: Highlighting the importance of including diverse geographical and cultural perspectives (and, indeed, of translation and multilingualism) in public humanities work in literature.


• Public Humanities and Policy: Discussing the role of literary public humanities in informing and shaping public policy.


• Evaluating Public Humanities Impact: Developing methods for assessing the social and cultural impact of public humanities projects in literature.

The seminar welcomes a broad range of methodological perspectives: papers that employ critical theory are perfectly welcome, for instance, as are case-studies of real-life experiences.

Publication Plan

This past two ACLA seminars that this organiser was responsible for have each culminated in an edited collection of essays. Although there are no guarantees, the organiser is willing to pitch an edited collection based on this seminar to publishers too, should there be interest from the participants.