Public scholarship is rapidly becoming a crucial part of our academic CVs. Personally, I (Vaughn) find public scholarship to be the most important part of our job as communicators of the past, using our rigorous research skills and knowledge to share what we’ve learned with the public. [Ben very much agrees!] Public scholarship can also generate new ideas for your work and/or allow you to research something you might feel guilty spending time on if it’s not directly related to your current dissertation/book project/teaching. So have fun with it and make your passions into a line for the CV so it feels like less of a guilty pleasure and more of just a pleasure.
Public scholarship, or public humanities in our case, can feel daunting to try to add into our repertoire of communication skills, but hopefully some of the resources here and around our site can help give you the confidence to get started!
Deciding Your Medium(a)
There are many ways to be a public scholar far beyond this list, but here are some starting places:
- Op-eds or essays: As a low-stakes way of dipping your toe into public scholarly writing, you could try writing a one-off piece for a site you frequent. Don’t fret if you don’t frequent a site, grad school is enough on its own! Check out our Pitchables page for publications that accept pitches, pick a couple sites, peruse their recently published work in the category you’re thinking, send them a pitch according to their guidelines, and see where it goes! If you have an idea for a piece but don’t know where to pitch it, feel free to email us so we can help you brainstorm.
- Guest posts: For an even lower-key bonus, if you are an independent scholar, grad student, or ECR and you have an idea for a guest post for Ben’s AmericanStudier blog or my Review Roulette, let us know and we can chat!
- Blogging: If writing feels right for you and you want to make a consistent space just for you and your ideas, consider blogging/hosting a newsletter.
- Note: There are many sites for hosting blogs, and I would encourage you to research them thoroughly before choosing a home for your work. Moving sites is difficult!
- Podcasting: If you’re more interested in public speaking than public writing, have a think about podcasting. Ben and I both have experience with podcasting and specifically with taking an idea that didn’t work in another medium and turning it into a different experience. My Joy of Star Wars podcast took real world concepts and events from American History and explained them with the common language of Star Wars, something that worked best for me in a discussion format on a podcast. Ben’s Baseball, Bigotry, & the Battle for America (now in its second season) combines narrative history, contemporary connections, and a conversational storytelling voice to explore under remembered baseball and Asian American stories.
- Note: I’d highly recommend pitching an idea to a podcast if you’re unsure if podcasting is right for you. Get a feel for the medium before committing to the whole shebang with equipment and platforms, etc.
- Public Speaking: If you need more immediate engagement with an audience and you have the time and patience, write to your local libraries, book stores, historical associations, universities, senior centers, community councils, etc. to propose an in-person talk.
- Note: It’s not exactly public, but writing to university departments, societies/organizations, or individual professors to propose a guest lecture is never a bad thing!
Practicing Your Voice
Making the shift to public scholarship also means adjusting the way you communicate. Every voice has a place in public scholarship, but it’s absolutely necessary to understand the tone of the publication you are pitching to before doing so, so as not to waste your own time if your style doesn’t fit theirs. Read around to see what the publication’s levels of jargon, theory, and academic tropes are and either adjust to it or find a better fit for your voice.
Practicing with public engagement is a big part of making this shift and shouldn’t be overlooked. When in doubt, the more accessible the language the better.
Staying Consistent
The hardest part of doing public scholarship, in my opinion, is trying not to get discouraged. It’s a hazard of the trade that you put your heart into something and only a few people may even see it, read it, share it, comment on it, whatever, but the most important thing is that you find what you are doing to be valuable. If it’s something you would like to read or listen to, or something that you want to write or create, then do it, regardless of your initial reach or audience engagement.
As Ben always says, consistency is key; writing every day, even if its just a few paragraphs, is essential to keeping your creative academic mind active and fresh. Publishing that daily writing can even offer you the benefits of conviction behind what you write as you open it to the world, feedback from potential audiences, networking with other thinkers, positive peer pressure to stay consistent, and the feeling of doing something that matters to you each and every day (or week/month/whatever works for your schedule!)
Promoting Your Work
Self-promotion is the next hardest part, but it also comes with the territory. Thankfully, our goal here is to scream about your work from the rooftops, so make sure you tell us every time you publish a new piece! Ben will add your work to #ScholarSunday which is shared on Bluesky every week. Be sure to share your work on social media as well and get your scholarship to the public!