Harper is generally regarded as one of the most popular African American writers of the nineteenth century; for a discussion of her contemporary reception, see Foster ð1990, 3-40Þ. 2 For examples of works citing and quoting Truth, see hooks ð1981, 159-60Þ, Linthwaite ð1987Þ, Haraway ð1992Þ, White ð1999Þ, Craig ð2002Þ, Brah and Phoenix ð2004Þ, and Koshy ð2011Þ.
This essay uses the experience of building a new public humanities program to explore approaches for revitalizing the field. While public humanities scholars have recently focused much of their attention on the “public” part of the public humanities, in the day-to-day institutional context the lack of attention on the “humanities” part can lead to problematic consequences for demonstrating their value. By exploring how the humanities are both lost and found in the different pieces of our nascent program, we argue that the best way to build lasting interdisciplinary and campus-community bridges—and assert the humanities’ vitality—is to rebalance so that we’re placing just as much on emphasis on the practice of the humanities as on the engagement of the public.
Using a classroom experience teaching Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing alongside a contemporary controversy over racial identity, this article explores the value of literary study for intervening in student attitudes toward core curriculum requirements. The author argues that literature is uniquely situated to teach the skills colleges most want students to acquire in their general education curricula, in turn providing a crucial method for responding to the “crisis” of the humanities in higher education today.
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