[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!]
One of the best parts of assembling my #ScholarSunday threads every week for the last 6.5 years has been the chance to learn about so many online spaces that are publishing public scholarly goodness. Here I’ll highlight just an exemplary handful (in alphabetical order), with a quick takeaway for each on what it helps us see and understand about public scholarship:
- Contingent magazine: I try to keep in mind at all times the immense privilege that comes from being a tenured full professor—privilege of a variety of types of course, but in this context the privilege to do public scholarly work knowing that it might not be as consistently supported as more “traditional” academic work. I’m doing what I can to change that narrative, including in our own institutional tenure & promotion process. But in the meantime, I love that there’s a public scholarly online magazine that publishes (and pays!) contingent scholars; and oh yeah, it always features among the best pieces out there!
- Literary Hub: I fully understand that the goal of much public scholarship is responding to current events and issues and offering contexts, analyses, etc. for those contemporary questions and subjects; that’s the case for most of my Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns, for example. But I have long made the case, and will continue to, that there’s an equally important role for public scholarship that presents fascinating subjects to its audiences, things we perhaps didn’t even know we needed to know (and/or at least could learn a lot more about). There are now tons of great spaces publishing such work, and LitHub is a phenomenal one for all things literature & culture.
- Made By History: When it comes to that first form of public scholarship, connecting the present to historical contexts, for quite a while now there’s been no better collective space for that work than Made By History. That was true when it was hosted by The Washington Post (where I had the chance to share two pieces), was true when it moved to Time magazine, and is true now that it’s found a new home at the Philadelphia Inquirer (where I shared a third piece earlier this year). As is often the case with these more mainstream media spaces, MBH is paywalled; but the Inquirer is a great local paper and well worth supporting, as is the excellent public scholarly work being done most every day at MBH.
- NiCHE Canada: While many public scholarly sites fall into one of the two types I’ve highlighted in these last two entries, there are plenty of others that combine the two—that feature both fascinating deep dives (often organized around a specific subject) and pieces connecting to and contextualizing our current moment. The Network in Canadian History & Environment is an excellent example of that kind of combinatory space, one that can feature on the same (random but telling) July day a deep-dive piece on a terrifying Niagara Falls tourist event from 1827 and a response to a Canadian politician’s false and dangerous claims about fossil fuels. Every layer of public scholarship ftw!
- Public Books: There’s one more type of online space I want to highlight, one that does similarly multi-faceted things but that takes (or at least echoes) the form of an older-school genre: the “review of books.” My friend Ed Simon has started a great recent entry of this category, the Pittsburgh Review of Books, in which I’ve been honored to share two essays to date. But there’s of course room for as many of these awesome publications as we can get, and I’m a huge fan of Public Books, which can pivot in a couple days from a podcast like Geraldo Cadava’s Writing Latinos to a series on the Wong Kim Ark case and birthright citizenship to a standalone essay like Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera’s on his grandfather and Edward Said. Man do I love the breadth and depth of public scholarship in 2026!
Last reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Examples of great public scholars or scholarship you’d share?
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