Resources for Publicly Engaged Doctoral Education

In connection with Preparing Publicly Engaged Scholars: A Guide to Innovation in Doctoral Education, the following is a list of recent resources related to public scholarship, graduate education, and tenure and promotion requirements. They include reports from the National Humanities Alliance, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Imagining America, as well as guidelines from disciplinary associations and programmatic models from a range of humanistic disciplines. Thanks to Stacy Hartman for creating this list.

In addition to these, ACLS is supporting university change-makers through a quarterly newsletter, Building Blocks for a New Academy, and a listserv where you can connect with others doing this work at other institutions. To join the listserv, please email [email protected].

Research and Reports

The following research and reports can support change-makers as they make their cases to colleagues and administrators. Many of the more quantitative reports are updated regularly, so check to be sure you are using the most current data.

From the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators Project:

• Job Status of Humanities PhDs at Time of Graduation (2020)
• Occupations of Humanities PhDs (2019)
• Earnings of Humanities PhDs (2019)

From Imagining America

• Preliminary Findings from the Publicly Active Graduate Education Research Project (2022)
• Navigating the Joys and Challenges of Public Scholarship in Graduate School (2022)
• Critical Intersections: Public Scholars Creating Culture, Catalyzing Change (2022)

From the Disciplinary Associations

We have included a few humanities disciplines here. If none of them apply to you, you can check with your discipline’s association to see what they have available. You can also use the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates’ tool for conducting queries or contact the NSF to ask for their help in pulling data for particular fields.

• Communications: Reports on the Discipline
• History: The 2023 AHA Academic Jobs Report
• Language and Literature: The MLA Job List, 2020–22
• Philosophy: Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis
• Religious Studies: Data and Studies

Program Models in Graduate and Undergraduate Education

Approaches to Training in the Public Humanities: Replicable Models for Building Public Humanities Training Programs by Michelle May-Curry and Younger Oliver, National Humanities Alliance (2023)

Graduate Education for a Thriving Humanities Ecosystem, edited by Stacy M. Hartman and Yevgenya Strakovsky (MLA 2023)

“The Future of Doctoral Education: Four Provocations for a More Just and Sustainable Academy” by Stacy M. Hartman and Bianca C. Williams (2023) in the LA Review of Books

The Community-Based PhD: Complexities and Triumphs of Conducting CBPR by Sonya Atalay and Alexandra McClearly (University of Arizona Press, 2022)

Graduate Education Models

In addition to the discussion in Preparing Publicly Engaged Scholars, an overview of current recent trends can be found here: “Public Humanities Certificate Programs: Critical Scholarship for the Twenty-First Century” by Aviv Hilbig-Bokaer, writing for the Modern Language Association’s Job List (2022)

• Georgetown University’s Engaged and Public Humanities Master’s Program
• Yale University’s Graduate Certificate in the Public Humanities
• The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Graduate Certificate in Community-Engaged Scholarship and Graduate Certificate in Culture, History, and the Environment
• The University of Oklahoma’s Graduate Certificate in Community Engagement
• University of California-Irvine and University of California-Riverside’s California Community College Internship Program
• Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute’s Public Humanities Graduate Practicum, the Center for Civic Engagement’s NU Chicago Humanities Initiative, and Black Metropolis Graduate Assistantship program
• University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities’ Barclay Simpson Scholars
• University of Washington’s Graduate Certificate in Public Critical Race Scholarship
• Ohio State University’s Imagined Futures Initiative
• Brandeis University’s PhD in English
• University of California-Davis’s Public Scholars for the Future
• University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School’s Program in Public Scholarship
• Case Western Reserve University’s Graduate Certificate in Public Humanities and Civic Engagement
• New York University’s Advanced Certificate in the Public Humanities and Advanced Certificate in Management and Leadership of Public Service Organizations

Undergraduate Models

• Virginia Tech’s Humanities for Public Service major
• Oberlin College’s Public Humanities Integrative Concentration
• University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s Interdisciplinary Co-Lab and minor in the Public Humanities
• Saint Mary’s College’s minor in Digital and Public Humanities
• University of California-Los Angeles’s Community Engagement and Social Change minor
• University of Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities’ Applied Humanities major
• Duke University’s Bass Connections (both graduate and undergraduate)

Evaluating Public Scholarship for Hiring, Tenure, and Promotion

In addition to the resources below, Campus Compact, a coalition of universities and colleges dedicated to supporting higher ed’s public mission, offers a publicly-available and comprehensive repository of resources on pursuing tenure as a community-engaged scholar (2022).

Imagining America’s Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University (2008)

Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, edited by Patricia A. Matthew (2016)

Organization of American Historians, AHA, and National Council on Public History report and white paper, Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian (2010)

The Modern Language Association’s Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship in Language and Literature Programs (2022)

American Historical Association’s Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship (2023)

The American Anthropological Association’s Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion Review: Communicating Public Scholarship in Anthropology (2017)

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities guidelines on the assessment of community engaged scholarship

UCLA’s Center for Community Engagement’s report, Recognizing Community-Engaged Scholarship for Academic Personnel Review (2021)

The University of Wisconsin’s Morgridge Center for Public Service’s publication, How to earn tenure while doing community-engaged scholarship (Undated)

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Balanced Integrative DEI Case Type for Tenure Track Faculty

Oregon State University’s Tenure and Promotion Guidelines (language emphasizing DEI work added in 2015)

Career Planning Resources for Graduate Students

From the Graduate Career Consortium, ImaginePhD, a free and confidential tool for career exploration, designed specifically for humanities and social science graduate students

Stanford University’s Meaningful Work Kit, a free values-based self-assessment tool

The Modern Language Association’s Doctoral Student Career Planning: A Guide for PhD Programs and Faculty Members in English and Other Modern Languages (2018)

Public Humanities and Community Engaged Research

From the National Humanities Alliance’s Humanities for All project:

• “A Typology of the Publicly Engaged Humanities” by Daniel Fisher (2023)
• “Goals of the Publicly Engaged Humanities” by Daniel Fisher (2023)
• “Partnership and Publicly Engaged Humanities Work” by Daniel Fisher (2023)

The Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers University-Newark

Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices, edited by Christina Santana, Roopika Risam, Aldo Garcia-Guevara, Joseph Krupczynski, Cynthia Lynch, John Reiff, Cindy Vincent and Elaine Ward (2023)

The Humanities in American Life: Transforming the Relationship with the Public, edited by Carin Berkowitz, Norman Marshall Bradburn, and Robert B. Townsend (special issue of Daedalus, Summer 2022)

Public Scholarship in Literary Studies, edited by Rachel Arteaga and Rosemary Erickson Johnson (2021)

“A Profile for Public Musicology” by Drew Massey in Musicology Now from the American Musicological Society (2015)

“The Insular World of Academic Research” by Karen Fischer in Chronicle of Higher Ed (2023)