Introduction

Public humanities happen in collaboration—between professors and students and between universities and communities. One also thinks and writes about the relationships between social justice and academic work and between praxis and scholarship. Like other humanities scholarship, work in the Public Humanities creates new knowledge but it also goes further to explore the humanities themselves, to present evidence of the importance of the humanities to a healthy society. Two main audiences for our Public Humanities projects are described: people within the university and communities outside the university. The best Public Humanities programs bridge these two audiences. In fact, most of the courses taught in Public Humanities are project based and several of the projects described in this book began in courses as students collaborated with a range of communities and scholars. Public Humanities practice includes Public Humanities scholarship.