In a week of rich programming for Princeton’s graduate students, the GradFUTURES Forum held several events of particular interest to students of the humanities, including a virtual panel discussion on the topic “Public Humanities: Connection, Community, Impact” available to students beyond campus via Zoom, and a workshop titled “How We Talk about Our Work.” These events underscore the importance of nurturing diverse interests as scholars and fostering connections across disciplines and communities beyond the academy.

“Humanities graduate education is being reimagined in exciting ways. Events like these highlight the manifold ways humanistic inquiry connects to the challenges and opportunities of our time.” 

— James M. Van Wyck, Assistant Dean for Professional Development

“Humanities graduate education is being reimagined in exciting ways. Events like these highlight the manifold ways humanistic inquiry connects to the challenges and opportunities of our time. These events also serve to connect graduate students to the entire suite of GradFUTURES programs, including our experiential fellowships and internships,” said James M. Van Wyck, Assistant Dean for Professional Development. “We work in concert with academic departments and partners on and beyond campus, and I’m thrilled that the Humanities Initiative will now be a key partner. The Initiative meets a real need, and it will have a tremendous impact.”

“GradFutures has been doing really great work in support of the graduate student community at Princeton, so much of which aligns perfectly with the focus of the Humanities Initiative on cross-disciplinary collaboration and experimenting with new frameworks and models for graduate research and teaching on campus,” said Professor Rachael Z. DeLue, Director of the Humanities Initiative.

The Panel: “Public Humanities: Connection, Community, Impact”

The panel discussion focused on connecting academic research with broader societal issues to inform public discourse, foster cultural understanding, and address contemporary challenges. Among the panelists was John Paul Christy, who, before taking on the role of Executive Director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative in March, worked with groups like GradFUTURES to explore the value and impact of the humanities in diverse sec

 “The more we value and incorporate the experiences, broader interests, and community commitments we bring with us into graduate study, the better prepared we will be to engage diverse audiences with the knowledge we create.” 

— John Paul Christy, Executive Director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative

Christy emphasized the importance of allowing interests and commitments that exist outside of dissertation topics to enrich one’s approach to research. “The more we value and incorporate the experiences, broader interests, and community commitments we bring with us into graduate study, the better prepared we will be to engage diverse audiences with the knowledge we create.”

Curator of Washington D.C.’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities Michelle May-Curry found her connection to public engagement when she turned a dissertation chapter into an installation in a gallery, prompting a career in public humanities advocacy. She pointed to a rich infrastructure of humanities support, including the National Humanities Alliance, where from 2020-2023 she served as Project Director of their Humanities for All Initiative, along with the ACLS, NEH, and others. May-Curry invoked a universal metaphor as she encouraged students to make use of the solid network of resources available and myriad methods of engaging—from creating a book club, lectures series, or exhibition to writing a monograph: “The public humanities doesn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s the moon that we’re pointing at,” she said. “It’s the connection with each other that’s important and that changes people’s lives.”

A strong commitment to shared experience and collaboration animates Yassine Ait Ali’s graduate studies in the Department of French & Italian. He conceived of the Princeton French Film Festival as a public humanities initiative and a community-engaged project and has been co-organizing it since 2023. “A central part of this endeavor lies in the meaningful collaborations we’ve built with various partners both on and off campus—including the Princeton Public Library, the Arts Council of Princeton, and several local schools—all with the goal of having a lasting and positive impact on the Princeton community in the broadest sense,” said Ali. “Witnessing the tangible outcomes of these partnerships strengthens my belief that the future of academia lies not in isolation, but in connection, collaboration, and public engagement.”

Fellow panelist Clifford Robinson, who leads the Princeton Public Library’s public humanities initiative, sees the impact of engaging the community first-hand and daily. “Specialized knowledge preserved in the disciplines remains crucial to the flourishing of the humanities as a whole,” he said, “but the knowledge achieved through these studies finds its ultimate purpose when it opens onto and even receives direction from communities beyond the academy, where the struggles of our time can be illuminated by insight into our shared predicament. Princeton’s active and engaged community is a source of constant provocation for me, requiring that I think not only beyond my training in Classical Studies.” 

Sarah Churchwell *98, professor of American literature and public humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and director of the UK’s national festival of humanities research, the Being Human Festival, also joined the discussion, along with Jeremy Stitts, Ph.D. student in the Department of History, and Edward Tenner ’65, an independent writer and speaker holding the titles of Distinguished Scholar in the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. 

The Workshop: “How We Talk about Our Work”

GradFUTURES Faculty Fellows in Professional Development Innovation, Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson, jointly appointed in the Departments of Art & Archaeology and African American Studies, and Professor Sophie Gee of the English Department, brought their innovative approach to the workshop “How We Talk about Our Work.”

Echoing the panel discussion, their aim was to explore strategies for articulating values and passions, as well as practical steps for connecting with a range of audiences within and beyond the academy. Gee spoke of the “Joy of being able to communicate what we do in the humanities to people outside the humanities because it turns out the world has a great appetite!” 

The message resonated with participants who stemmed from a variety of departments including art & archaeology, anthropology, architectural history, history, religion, sociology, and Spanish and Portuguese. As students voiced their motivations for joining the workshop, points of tension emerged. Concerns included finding interdisciplinary bridges to topics that seemed “too niche”; justifying and communicating research on a small group of sequestered materials to speak to pervasive, real-world concerns; working in a politicized sphere without building walls; or revitalizing the relevance of highly specific historical contexts.  

Working through these concerns, Gee and Arabindan-Kesson deemed these tensions useful and productive. “It’s the anxiety that’s the limitation,” said Gee,  “not the tension itself.”

Arabindan-Kesson encouraged students to frame their dissertation topics as an important part of their academic journey and area of expertise, but to allow time to “dream, create, and strategize” other positioning for their work like podcasts, panels, documentaries, reviews, or op-eds.

“Speaking with graduate students from across the humanities, it was interesting to hear how we each take on the limitations of our disciplines. This workshop invited us to understand those limitations as important tension points that help bring urgency to our work and how to communicate those to others.” 

— Anisa Tavangar, Graduate Student in the Department of Art & Archaeology

Students ended the workshop with a writing exercise as a method of discovering new perspectives on their work. They were tasked with spending six minutes writing about a thesis-related topic, followed by four minutes in which to remove half of that content, then another two minutes to halve it again, and finally one minute to distill the remainder into three words. The results generated poignant views into each student’s work that were as intriguing to the authors themselves.  

“The GradFUTURES workshop was a helpful exercise to process how I understand both the constraints and possibilities of my work as an art historian,” said A&A graduate student Anisa Tavangar. “Speaking with graduate students from across the humanities, it was interesting to hear how we each take on the limitations of our disciplines. This workshop invited us to understand those limitations as important tension points that help bring urgency to our work and how to communicate those to others. In my own work, I walked away from the workshop better able to express how centering visual evidence can invite reflections on policy, history, social theory, or economics, and show how these historical consequences travel and endure in the artwork available to us.”

Looking Forward

Supporting graduate students in the humanities is a shared priority for GradFUTURES and the Princeton Humanities Initiative, which are exploring new ways to collaborate in the coming academic year. “Many graduate students in the humanities are eager to engage audiences beyond the academy in the creation and dissemination of their research,” Christy said. “We look forward to working with partners like GradFUTURES to facilitate this work and to help foster a community of practice for graduate students pursuing public engagement.”

“The public humanities doesn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s the moon that we’re [all] pointing at. It’s the connection with each other that’s important and that changes people’s lives.” 

— Michelle May-Curry, Curator of Washington D.C.’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities