The Being Human Festival, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2024, is the UK’s national humanities research festival, held every November to engage local communities with creative and participatory events that are free to attend. Over its first decade, Being Human has helped transform UK public engagement practices in the humanities, strengthened community ties, and inspired academic and public participants alike. Looking back on 10 years of Being Human, the director of the festival takes readers behind-the-scenes to see who makes it happen, how, and why. Looking forward, the festival aims to further transform public engagement infrastructure, support vernacular knowledge, and expand globally, advocating for the humanities’ indispensability in a democratic society.

Humanities research is underfunded, and the institutional sources and intellectual effects of this underfunding are insufficiently appreciated. The paper gives an example of the negative effects of a humanities discipline’s lack of research infrastructure on scholarly work. Section 2 describes the main categories through which research funds arrive on U.S. campuses. Section 3 describes the disproportions between Science & Engineering (S&E or “STEM”) funding and funding for social and cultural disciplines. Section 4 discussions the “institutional funds” that universities use to cover research costs from their own pockets. Section 5 shows that universities do not use their institutional funds to compensate for inequities in humanities funding but to perpetuate them. Section 6 claims that the current state of humanities funding abridges academic freedom and calls on humanities administrative personnel to lead a national campaign to rectify the current situation. Misconceptions about humanities research and its funding must be openly acknowledged and addressed so that it can come to have public effects that reflect its actual intellectual achievements.