This summer, we launched the Humanities for All blog to showcase publicly engaged humanities initiatives in the words of the faculty, staff, students, and community partners directly involved in the projects. Our September 8 post by Lillian Wilson focuses on the Wayne State Humanities Clinic, an innovative graduate internship program at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three interns from the humanities and humanistic social sciences were matched with 25 non-profits and businesses that serve Detroit communities. In some cases, an interdisciplinary group or pair of interns worked with a single community partner.

In August of 2019, NHA and Routledge, Taylor & Francis launched Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities, a free-access collection of humanities articles and book chapters that feature public engagement. The collection, drawn from across the Taylor & Francis books and journals programs, illustrates a range of ways that publicly engaged scholarship can lead to—and enhance—publication. The initial collection included 10 publications, which we augmented twice to include new articles and book chapters.

In building and promoting Humanities for All, we've had a unique opportunity to reflect on public engagement. We have learned from all who are involved in publicly engaged humanities work, and shared their voices in profiles of their work and in essays that consider trends in the field. Expanding upon this work, we are delighted to announce the launch of the Humanities for All blog, which invites others to reflect in their own words on their work and promising models and trends in the field.

How can we build support for publicly engaged humanities work at our universities and colleges?

Before kicking off the 2019 National Humanities Conference in Honolulu, we hosted a pre-conference workshop to address this question with over 100 humanities scholars, administrators, and association leaders.

Partnership drives many of the publicly engaged humanities initiatives collected in NHA’s Humanities for All database. These initiatives drawn from across the country bring scholars and students together with a wide variety of partners, including libraries, K–12 schools, community organizations and centers, and individual community members. In all cases, they draw on shared knowledge and resources to advance particular academic and public objectives. They are able to do more—and better—by working together.

Over the last two years, our Humanities for All initiative has worked to document and promote publicly engaged humanities research, teaching, preservation, and programming in U.S. higher education. The initiative brings together over 1,500 examples, showcasing the range of humanities work conducted with and for communities by scholars at universities, colleges, and scholarly societies across the United States.

Through our Humanities for All initiative, we have been working to support publicly engaged scholarship, cognizant of all the ways their work enriches academic and community life. While publicly engaged scholarship has proliferated, there remains concern among scholars about how this work is credited to them in the context of the three traditional expectations for faculty promotion and tenure in the humanities: research, teaching, and service. With this in mind, we want to support scholars in publishing on their work and have been working to showcase how publicly engaged work and scholarship can go hand in hand. To that end, we are delighted to partner with Routledge, Taylor & Francis to release Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities: a free-access collection of recent articles featuring publicly engaged humanities work.

One of the great benefits of leading the Humanities for All initiative is having the opportunity to meet with NHA members to introduce them to the website and to learn more about their publicly engaged work. Over three days in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, I had the opportunity to learn from NHA members at the National Humanities Center, Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

April is National Poetry Month. In celebration of the importance of poetry, here are three ways scholars, students, and community members are working together to engage diverse audiences in poetry.