My maternal grandparents were from Warsaw. On one side, only my grandmother survived the Holocaust; on the other, my grandfather and his two brothers escaped together. My sense of family always included those who were lost to genocide. The absence has always been at least as visible as the presence. Ghosts. Shadows. Still images in stories. I knew they were there. Somehow. Somewhere. As of October 2024, these ghosts have a home, a place in the city, in their city of Warsaw, Poland. This was the last place they resided of their own free will. Their names are etched in brass, planted in concrete – stumbling stones or Stolpersteine, to be exact – to remind passersby of the last place they lived by choice in Warsaw. This public humanities/public art project reveals a lot about memory, monument, and meaning in a much-contested arena – the history of Jews in Poland.

This article reflects on the 2024 public humanities project “Susannah Darwin at The Mount: Hidden Maternal Histories,” held at Charles Darwin’s family home in Shrewsbury, England. Focusing on Katy Alston’s Mapping Susannah Darwin, a co-produced creative map stemming from the project that shows The Mount from the perspective of Darwin’s mother, Susannah, I reframe the fixed project “output” as the product of much more fluid sets of relationships and circumstances. This article blends personal reflection with insights from critical cartography, concepts of the object “life cycle,” and my underpinning research on the Darwin family and home. I aim to provide an accessible but critically informed account of the practices, relationships, serendipities, and setbacks that can characterise the humanities in action.

I was the inaugural Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) at UC San Diego from 2016 to 2019. The job entailed running 16 undergraduate programs, but that was only half of the gig. I was also charged with creating a hub for public arts and humanities. It was exciting, but daunting. It was a chance to cultivate meaningful exchange between the University and greater San Diego, but I was not well-versed in engaging public audiences or collaborating beyond academic circles. Against the backdrop of Trump’s rise to power, my first move was to announce two public forums: Challenging Conversations, and Community Arts and Resistance. Despite my steep learning curve in doing public events, IAH came to prioritize empathy, togetherness, and social justice storytelling. Our success was measured not simply in the number of events or audience members (those mattered, to be sure!), but in community building that grew from such work. It was less about one-off events than sustained conversation with our campus and surrounding communities. The work was collaborative and political. It rested on bringing communities and institutions together, pushing beyond the University’s gates, blending arts with humanities, being adaptable, and embracing the possible.

This article offers practical advice on how to encourage our own students to deliver dynamic presentations to local high school students as their final course projects. Based on years of experience teaching “The Holocaust in American Literature,” I offer specific suggestions on how “traveling teaching” can accomplish memorable moments for our students and high school students alike, thereby providing examples of how a new national initiative that cements a closer relationship between higher education and K-12 schools might proceed.

During the pandemic, specifically in 2021, I established a virtual network that gathers Iraqi women academics who are based in the diaspora and in Iraq. The network is a private WhatsApp group and an X account that promotes the scholarly work of Iraqi women and fosters collaboration. We have attracted the attention of international institutions, enlarged our group to include Iraqi women academics across the continents, and introduced our work to a larger audience. Like any other group, the network has faced several challenges. We are academic women who are overloaded with endless tasks and burdened with family responsibilities, but we have found solidarity in our group. Our steps are small and slow, but we are making progress in enhancing the global visibility of Iraqi women academics and supporting the higher education system in Iraq.

It is possible to communicate academic thought without being reductive, but that rarely happens in U.S. news media. Instead, academia is mined to produce journalistic edutainment: a media product that turns information into entertainment. Edutainment is pervasive, particularly in U.S. public radio and podcasting, the medium in which the authors work. A major reason edutainment dominates audio is that it is difficult to convey complex ideas in sound. Listeners, unlike readers, cannot control the speed at which they engage with material, which puts them at constant risk of getting lost. In U.S. public radio, the default solution is to make information entertaining. This approach has encouraged strict rules about everything from the length of stories and use of sound to the tone of narration and narrative structure. These rules all but ensure the production of edutainment. It does not have to be this way. Audio can be a powerful medium for academic work. To succeed, one must not pander but instead challenge the rules and explore new formats that honor the complexity of academic work. This is the story of our attempt to do just that with a new audio show, Ways of Knowing.

This article considers the role of the public humanities in fostering conversations about climate science and policy through a transdisciplinary performance at the University at Buffalo in New York. The Great Lakes Climate Theatre Initiative is a new project that brings together sustainability scientists with theater practitioners to create new and mixed methods for climate preparedness that are both inclusive and impactful. Toward a Climate Haven was the first project conducted by the initiative with the goal of exploring how Buffalo might become a safe and equitable destination for climate migrants. This first project resulted in a public event that combined the performance of a newly-commissioned play, a talkback session, readings from a local youth writing workshop, and a presentation from a local county official. In this article, our team reflects on how we brought these various threads together to leverage the public humanities in the effort to prepare for climate change.