What is the Public Humanities Initiative in Graduate Education?
The Public Humanities Initiative in Graduate Education, PHIGE, invites PhD students, MA students and faculty from across the humanities to explore connections to the very publics that frame their scholarly endeavors and inform their teaching and research.
- Through Doctoral Fellowships, PhD students gain real-life experience translating their scholarship in public contexts while building networks for negotiating a rapidly evolving employment landscape.
- Advanced Certificate Programs give PhD and MA students the opportunity to delve into the theory and practice of public engagement.
- For students and faculty, PHIGE hosts an innovative curriculum, skills-building workshops and a variety of engaging public events focused on this relevant and growing discipline.
What is the Public Humanities?
The Public Humanities is an evolving set of practices and approaches that promote collaborative knowledge production between academic and non-academic communities, both locally and globally.
The Public Humanities aims to develop teaching, research, evaluation, and scholarship into connective activities between those inside and outside of the university by focusing on our shared interests in “fields of value that are irreducible to instrumentality and profitability.”
The Public Humanities fosters a transformative vision of the humanities, proposing changes to the training of graduate students, to what counts for tenure, to the jobs that humanities majors get after graduation. Lastly, the Public Humanities is a historical set of practices and approaches that continues to negotiate and remake the consolidation of hierarchy and Western canonicity that have sometimes characterized university partnerships with other communities.
Visit PH Across Campus to read profiles of Public Humanities centers and initiatives on campus.