[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!]
On what we can learn from one organization entirely focused on public scholarship and one where it’s more of a work in progress.
In lieu of a full first paragraph for this post, I’m going to ask you to check out a few other posts if you would. Back in 2017 I dedicated a weeklong series to my experiences with the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), and would love if you could take at least a quick look at them. (After that series dropped I became the SSN Boston Chapter Co-Leader, a role in which I served for about 7 years.) I’ve written a ton in this space about my 20+ years of work with the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), but in particular would point you to two posts around my 2016 Presidential conference in Hartford where I highlighted some of the ways I tried to connect that academic organization to public conversations. Check those out if you would, and then come on back for more on these two great orgs.
Welcome back! I’ve remained connected to both of these organizations in the decade or so since those posts, and have also seen Vaughn begin to build her own leadership roles in both over the last year or so, and would say there are important lessons from both when it comes to practicing public scholarship. Because SSN was founded by social scientists who were most interested in influencing policymakers and related conversations, it has continued to focus a good bit on both the social sciences and policy; we experienced that continued emphasis at the SSN National Convening in June. But at the Q&A for one of that Convening’s plenary sessions, I made sure to remind the group that we need to be just as welcoming to and supportive of humanities scholars and educators, not only because just as many of those folks have been doing the public scholarly thing for a long time now (although duh—my 16th anniversary blog series is in a couple weeks), but also and especially because humanities folks have vital work to do within the aegis of SSN. Maybe not as directly in policy debates (although it can be for sure), but in the equally important work of media, conversations, narratives and stories, collective memories, and more. If we influence policy without being part of those public spaces, I would argue we haven’t done nearly enough.
NeMLA is itself a humanities organization, so there’s no need to argue for that emphasis; but it’s also a more academic organization, and thus one where a decent percentage of both the membership and the leadership aren’t particularly interested in connecting scholarship to the public. I have never and would never try to shift that perspective for any individual (although I think almost all of us work on things that would be of interest to broader audiences, so I’d always encourage folks to keep the option in mind at least), but for an organization I have to admit that I feel differently—whether this has long been true (as I would argue) or not, it’s quite simply the case that in 2026 nothing and no one in the realms of higher education, academia, and related fields has the luxury of not trying to make the case for what we do, why it matters, and how it’s of interest to audiences far beyond our academic peers. I’ve been trying to make those conversations part of NeMLA since at least my 2016 conference, and in this vein (along with many others) I’m really proud of one of Vaughn’s signature contributions to the organization to date: an interdisciplinary roundtable series in which NeMLA members share their work and ideas around topics of broad public interest (the first was on parenting, for example). Maybe this work isn’t for everybody, but it’s most definitely for NeMLA, and all of our organizations.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Examples of great public scholars or scholarship you’d share?
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