I’m excited to announce my involvement in Day of Public Humanities (#DayofPH), a public humanities initiative about public humanities. So meta! When I started working at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, I inevitably got questions from friends in and beyond academic contexts about what this “public humanities” thing is and what kind of work I do. Many of us here get these questions, so myself, Robyn Schroeder (Postdoctoral Fellow and Director of Graduate Studies in Public Humanities), and Inge Zwart (graduate student in Public Humanities) decided to spend the past year researching the term, its uses, its limits, its past, present, and future. While doing this work, we became particularly interested in how and why public humanities practitioners came to embrace the term “public humanities” and what forms of labor they do on a daily basis. Like the Day of Digital Humanities (#DayofDH) initiative, #DayofPH asks practitioners to make their labor visible, reflect on the field and where it’s going, and show people what cool things they’re up to. We hope you can join us on May 9th, 2017!

You can learn more about #DayofPH on our web site. Specifically, you can find suggestions for how to participate on May 9th, blog posts highlighting some of the day-to-day work we do here at the JNBC, and recommendations for further action before and after May 9th. We also talk about the project on the JNBC blog. We’re excited to see what other people are working on, what “public humanities” means to them, and how we might all learn to become better Public Humans.

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about this project on Twitter (@JimMc_Grath) or via email (james_mcgrath[at]brown). And if you’re attending NCPH next week, I’ll be there too, so please get in touch if you’d like more info!