Where do the humanities live?

This interview appeared in the Fall 2018 Letters & Science magazine.

Fifty years after Wisconsin banned the use of the pesticide DDT in 1968, more than 1,500 students from 25 high schools across the state read biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a 1962 classic of popular science literature that exposed the harms of DDT and other chemical insecticides and launched the modern environmental movement.

“It made us absolutely care about the issue,” said Jasmine Love, a sophomore at Golda Meir School in Milwaukee. “From the first few pages, when Carson was using the metaphor of the ‘silent spring,’ it was really sad and even gory. But this is what DDT was doing to the environment. This was the reality.”

The book was the 2017-18 selection for the Great World Texts program, an outreach initiative of the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities. Now in its 15th year, Great World Texts is the Center’s longest-running public program, connecting rural, urban and suburban students through a shared experience of close reading. Previous works have spanned the ages, from Sophocles’ Antigoneto Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.

After spending a year with the text in connection with UW humanities scholars, who develop supporting materials and offer teaching workshops, the high school students and their teachers travel to campus for a conference. This year’s keynote speaker was activist and biologist-writer Sandra Steingraber, the latest in a line-up of keynotes that has included Margaret Atwood, Arundhati Roy and David Henry Hwang.

“Fifteen hundred high school students read this book,” marveled Steingraber, holding up the recently issued American Library Edition of Carson’s 50-year-old classic, which she edited. “And they connected with it. They were energized by Rachel Carson’s message about the environment.”

Tackling difficult questions across the boundaries that might typically divide us (age, race, religion, education level, field or specialty) defines the cutting-edge approach developed at the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities under the leadership of English professor Sara Guyer. The Center has developed an international reputation for excellence in what’s commonly known as the “public humanities,” thanks to her unwavering insistence that people outside the university care deeply about the questions that humanities scholars are asking. Complex ideas matter. 

“Where do the humanities live? Not only in university libraries and classrooms, but also outside of the academy,” says Guyer, who not only directs the Center (and has since 2008) but is also president of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. If the humanities are to survive, she says, we need to re-think traditional boundaries. 

For more than a decade, the Center has brought high school teachers (and their students) into collaboration with humanities faculty, sent graduate students out into the community, welcomed the public to campus for lectures from prominent public intellectuals and greatly expanded career opportunities outside academia for humanities PhDs. 

At the heart of these endeavors is an ever-increasing sense of urgency. The humanities offer ways to come together around some of the world’s most pressing issues. 

“Our approach begins with admitting that no single discipline can solve a di cult problem,” Guyer says. “We need to foster partnerships with colleagues across disciplines — in STEM fields, in the School of Business — and imagine new ways of working together.” 

Public Humanities in Action

By engaging the public,enlivening scholarly discourse and bringing the world to Madison, the Center for the Humanities expands upon the great tradition of humanities scholarship at UW-Madison. Here are four more examples: 

HUMANITIES NOW 

What? A series of public panels o ering perspectives from leading UW-Madison scholars on current events 

When? In response to a regional, national or global crisis 

Emergency room visits for suspected opioid overdoses increased 109 percent in Wisconsin from July 2016 to September 2017, as reported by the Wisconsin State Journal in March 2018. Nationwide, the rate of ER visits went up 30 percent, and in the Midwest 70 percent. The roots of the crisis are tangled. In April, a public forum —The Opioid Epidemic: A State in Crisis — drew more than 150 people. Many came because they knew someone in trouble. “The panel [of UW experts] took an empathetic approach that asked us to think about why and how this happened, not just what we can do to fix it,” said Emily Clark, associate director of the Center for the Humanities. 

HUMANITIES WITHOUT BOUNDARIES 

What? An array of intellectual offerings on a par with the nation’s finest cultural centers 

Why? Brings the world to Madison 

For this public lecture series, Center director Sara Guyer invites a wide spectrum of thinkers — from theorists such as Wendy Brown to public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jill Lepore — to talk about their work and its relationship to the world today. She also invites “practitioners” such as chef Alice Waters and fashion designer agnés b. “It’s not just a single lecture, but a season,” she says. “Taken together, the lectures represent a set of issues and flash points in the humanities. We don’t just look for the best or brightest. We ask, ‘Who is transforming our understanding?’” 

BORGHESI-MELLON WORKSHOPS 

What? Working groups centered on an interdisciplinary topic 

Why? Allows faculty and students to work together outside the classroom 

These workshops unite participants around questions that are probing, inclusive and courageously optimistic. The Black Arts + Data Futures workshop asked: How do African American communities build self-determination in the 21st century? Ashley Baccus, a molecular biologist and artist, created a virtual reality experience in which people could inhabit a black woman’s body in a futuristic hair salon. Cutting-edge technology coupled with a vibrant cultural moment created a multidimensional experience that boosted empathy and was unflinchingly about black joy. The workshops are administered through the Borghesi-Mellon Workshop Fund, named in honor of Nancy (Economics, ’69) and David Borghesi (BBA, ’70), who provided the matching support for a 2:1 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

GRADUATE PUBLIC HUMANITIES EXCHANGE (HEX)  

What? Innovative, mutually rewarding partnerships between community partners and graduate students 

Why? Takes engagement beyond volunteerism 

Sarah Dimick’s Humanities Exchange project, Baldwin’s Heirs: Police and Black Lives in American Literature, brought officers from the Madison Police Department together with high school and college students of color to read about police work and black lives in American literature. Discussing writers ranging from James Baldwin to Claudia Rankine, the group reflected on convictions about race, ideas of justice and what public safety in the 21st century ultimately requires.