by Stephen Groening

If the mission of the public humanities is to produce greater dialogue between academics and non-academics, it’s not clear to me how these initiatives actually foster and support the work of non-academics. Not just because of funding distribution, but because the entire project rests upon the premise that somehow turning Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble from a dense and difficult book into a blog or Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism into a series of YouTube videos would inject new energy into the humanities, produce widespread interest in humanities scholarship, and even re-energize a moribund field. In other words, the humanities are conceived of as a good product with bad marketing.

by Lawrence Davis

The fragmentary nature of the films overall is both a plus and a minus for the viewer. Anyone with a scant understanding of the GDR’s history might feel cut adrift as the films, many without sound, scan city streets, parks, highways, monuments, etc. Human experience is fragmented; people’s memories are never as precise and they might think; imagination seeps in, people remember the good and suppress or embellish the bad.

"The Survey of the Humanities in American Life is a first-of-its-kind nationally representative survey of Americans about their engagement with and perception of the humanities."