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Academic real talk on public humanities: from the moment I got my PhD I believed that I had a responsibility to give back to the communities upon which my own personal success as a professional academic rested. 1/n
Beginning with a generous @bl_eap grant to digitize manuscripts in Goa and the support of the then head of my history department at AUC, Khaled Fahmy, I embarked on what became a real commitment to public humanities work in my career. 2/n
Despite the turbulence in Egypt AUC was an incredibly supportive institutional environment for this work. The Theory and Practice workshop my colleague Hakem al-Rustom and I launched at HUSS with support from @MellonFdn grew into a full-fledged lab for the engaged humanities. 3/n
Whenever I am back in the archives in India, I try to help out the incredibly hard-working and under-resourced archivists I meet there. After making my home in DC, and realizing my own implication in gentrification as a result, I began a community archiving initiative there. 4/n
For all the satisfaction this work gives me, this work has had little impact on my own career advancement. Despite advice from well-meaning seniors to focus on tenure instead of work like this, I still did it, knowing that it is not accounted for nor rewarded adequately. 5/n
While I got tenure, this work is currently delaying my advancement to full professorship. Instead of writing my book which is the main performance standard in my field, I spent much of my time on these projects and writing grants for them. 6/n
Grant-writing of this sort for humanities is institutionally very poorly supported. AUC was exceptional- in most universities, support for grant-writing is geared towards big-ticket STEM and policy grants. That's where you'll get course releases and dedicated support staff 7/n
For even relatively small grants, this means I generally have to independently research every single line item in my proposed budgets from printing publicity materials to booking train tickets. 8/n
We often have to negotiate universities not taking a large cut (~35-40%). This makes sense in the lab sciences where university equipment and resources are needed for project success. It makes less sense in the humanities where our work is usually low-overhead or off-site. 9/n
Even taking into account administrative support hours, such a large cut for humanities grants (which are usually small anyway) means we are essentially subsidizing other disciplines while making our projects inviable. 10/n
For smaller grants, there is little support for grants administration. I have been hugely lucky in our departmental staff (shoutout to the amazing @chidester_amy) but if you're not so lucky, be prepared to do tons of accounting and other admin work you are not trained for. 11/n
Invariably, I have paid large amounts of money out of pocket for all these projects. Especially when you are working with students, staff hours are also mentoring hours for you. It is, to put it bluntly, an incredible amount of work. 12/n
What has made it worthwhile in the past has been student and community engagement. Those outcomes are both less possible and less visible in the strange environment we inhabit in a post #COVID19 world. 13/n
This work has also enriched and deepened my scholarship and teaching. I am a better historian because of the relationships I have built with archivists and because of the engagement I have with the communities whose past I research. I am also a more patient, caring teacher. 14/n
What has it cost me? Undoubtedly, more conventional modalities of academic success. My publication rate is one article per year. I've written one book. I am proud of those articles but I physically cannot write more and balance this kind of work. 15/n
Public humanities work is also emotionally draining. Most of the time, there is no happy "outcome" or even an ending. If you are doing it right, it's about building ongoing engagement with communities. This is made hard not least by the mobility of academic life. 16/n
Those who do public humanities work are often themselves from disadvantaged communities or work amongst them. The culture of university diversity accounting means that such work is often met with praise but does not garner real, material support. This is beyond frustrating. 17/n
Ethically, I still believe that my initial instinct and commitment at the beginning of my career was correct. In my own training, I emphasize the ethics of our practice as historians- in the archive, in the classroom and in our writing- and I stand by that. 18/n
But the truth of public humanities is that the personal costs are enormous, and the chance of institutional change stemming from it low. I don't see enough open discussion of that in public humanities and it behooves us to shed light on that experience too. 19/19
