[This coming weekend, Vaughn and I will lead a workshop entitled “Improvisation & Innovation: New Possibilities for Public Scholarship” at the American Studies Association conference in Chicago. So this week I wanted to engage with a few questions about and examples of this vital work, leading up to a weekend post with some further details about that workshop!]
For the next few posts in this series, I wanted to pay brief tribute to examples of excellent public scholarship from the last decade or so (obviously we could go back much further than that as well). I don’t know that any work published during that time exemplifies this genre more than does the New York Times magazine’s 1619 Project, created and edited by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and written by a number of historians, authors, and artists.
I’ve said much of what I’d most want to highlight about that project in a couple of places: this January 2020 Saturday Evening Post Considering History column; and the Introduction to my book Of Thee I Sing (2021), which built on and expanded that column’s emphases. But both of those pieces focus specifically on the 1619 Project as exemplary 21st century critical patriotism, and so I wanted to say a bit more here about what makes it equally exemplary as a model of public scholarship. More exactly, I’d say the Project embodies three crucial, interconnected combinations for which all such scholarship should strive:
- Nuance and clarity: All scholarship should strive to be nuanced in how it engages with its subjects, both because everything is nuanced and because it’s important to model that practice in a society and world that tends toward constant oversimplification. But at the same time, we have to be able to communicate our nuanced ideas clearly, so they can reach audiences. Not an easy one-two punch, but it’s the gig, and the Project’s contributions achieved this tricky balance.
- Analysis and argument: This is a parallel but slightly different point. Public scholarship by default isn’t the same as an op ed, isn’t rhetoric, and definitely isn’t a political pamphlet (although public scholars can and should work in all of those veins if and when they want to!). It depends on analysis, which requires the use of skills and lenses that almost never boil things down to singular arguments. But once again, we have to be able to take that work and communicate the “so what?” answers to our audiences—why these things matter, what we can take away from them, and how, to foreshadow the final point, they have something to say in and about our moment. The Project modeled that second step, perhaps especially in its overarching frames (such as in Hannah-Jones’ wonderful, Pulitzer-winning introductory essay).
- Past and present: This point pulls together the prior two, but is also about the subjects being explored. Historically-focused public scholarship (not the only type, obviously, but the type in which I’m most interested in my own work for sure) has to start with the histories, and should do justice to them in nuanced, analytical, thoughtful ways. But I also believe we should be straightforward, clear, and argumentative about how and why these historical subjects connect to our present moment, society, issues and debates, identities and communities, etc. That doesn’t mean exact analogies, but rather connections, legacies, throughlines, and the like; history doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme. And the 1619 Project exemplifies an exploration and expression of those rhymes.
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Examples of great public scholars or scholarship you’d share?
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