Welcome!

Introducing the Kaplan Institute Public Humanities Substack

We are a group of scholars, teachers, writers, thinkers, and artists in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University who are striving to expand humanities scholarship outside the boundaries of the academy. Each year, our Public Humanities Graduate Practicum supports a cohort of 12 Northwestern doctoral students as they explore the theory and practice of publicly-engaged scholarship. In conjunction with the Practicum, we also host public events on topics including ethics and community engagement, the role of social media in public scholarship, and the future of humanities graduate education. 

Each year, Fellows in our Public Humanities Practicum develop their own public projects with guidance and financial support from the Kaplan Institute. Since the program’s inception in 2020, Practicum Fellows have carried out both local and international projects, imagining creative ways to connect their academic work to an array of communities and publics beyond the academy. Their projects have taken diverse forms, from online recipe indexes and collaborative comics to podcasts and video series to translation workshops and writing communities. They have brought humanistic thinking to bear on issues of climate resilience, the politics of murals in Chicago, racial inequities in STEM education, and the fates of historical monuments, to name just a few. Practicum Fellows have created enduring resources, built fruitful community partnerships, and carried their public humanities work into careers as arts administrators, leaders of humanities institutes, museum curators, tenure-track professors, and more.

This Substack will serve as a platform for the Kaplan Institute’s Public Humanities work. We’ll be highlighting the activities of current and previous Practicum Fellows, advertising upcoming events, and sharing public humanities resources. We hope that this page will serve as a digital archive and useful resource for folks in and beyond the Northwestern community. In the meantime, you can view a full list of our previous Fellows and their projects here. You can also keep up with the Institute’s other activities by following us on Instagram at @kaplanhum and via our website, humanities.northwestern.edu.