ABSTRACT
This essay offers a brief history of the rise of “the public humanities,” beginning with the culture wars context in which the term first arose in the 1980s. Explicating a tension between scholars who center bridging scholarship from the university out to the broad public with those for whom public humanities methods have represented a challenge to scholarly norms and labor practices of the university itself, the essay traces the gradual institutionalization of the Public Humanities since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Reference to the “Day of Public Humanities” programs produced by the author and her collaborators, illuminate contemporary concerns in the Public Humanities movement about academic precarity; the criteria and standards for academic promotion; and the vocationalization of graduate study in the humanities.
