The New Public Humanists

There is sufficient evidence of the shift from the public humanities to the mediating practices of publicly engaged academic scholars to confirm the impression that a new sort of public humanities is finding traction in American colleges and universities. Many academic humanists see themselves as participants in the broader civic engagement movement in higher education, an unfolding response to the "Copernican revolution" that is agitating higher education. An important strand of that movement is the effort to knit together public work and academic work. Not all civically engaged campus-community partnerships result in public scholarship, and not all public endeavors by scholars are civically engaged. But the idea of public scholarship as central to civic engagement in higher education is particularly resonant because it changes how faculty members see themselves. Here, Ellison explores platforms for learning how to do public scholarship in the humanities and discusses how the new public humanists name and claim professional identities.