Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

I ran the online classics publication Eidolon from 2015 to 2020. Eidolon sought to make Classics “personal and political, feminist and fun,” publishing more than 500 articles and receiving 3 million total views in its five years of active existence. Because our editors (and many of our writers) were scholars who grew up consuming and producing digital content, we were able to bring a measure of academic rigor and methodology to inform urgent personal and timely essays. Eidolon’s position as both insiders and outsiders to the discipline of Classics made it uniquely suited to address some of the most challenging and necessary conversations facing the field, from white supremacist classical appropriation online to sexual harassment and racial discrimination within the discipline. But the lack of institutional support that allowed total freedom also made the publication vulnerable and contributed to its closure in late 2020. It’s wonderful to have fans, but a publication also needs champions. I argue that, for an online publication to be exciting and fresh but also resilient, it must maintain a delicate balance between fearlessly commenting on the most pressing issues of the day (without, perhaps, waiting for the temporal distance and perspective that academics usually prefer!) while still cultivating the institutional support necessary to weather inevitable challenges. And, most importantly, you need to have fun while doing it.

How do we do public scholarship? It might seem like a simple question, but as anyone who has attempted to experiment with academic norms—let alone work collaboratively in and through institutional regulations, cultural expectations, and diverse personalities—is well aware, things get complicated quickly. As scholars, practitioners, and educators in the public humanities, the authors offer a set of sticky and thorny questions that are both theoretically minded and practice oriented, as possibilities to consider throughout the process of working on public projects or with community partners. Questions are grouped thematically—Framing, Planning, Partnerships, Institutions, Tools, Outputs and Forms, Documentation, Evaluation and Reflection—though are not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. In so doing, the essay insists that public scholarship not be codified into a clearly-defined discipline, but rather acknowledged as both an always already present practice for many scholars and in a constant state of emergence as a field. To that end, the authors also invite direct engagement with these questions, both inside and outside of the space of the text, encouraging readers to generate and share their own questions as well.

Three recent books focused on law, gender, and Islam not only make important individual contributions to the field of law and religion, but together, in their attention to issues of gender, sex, violence, and law, signal an important development in both this field and the field of Islamic studies. This state of the field essay examines Kecia Ali's revised and expanded edition of Sexual Ethics and Islam, Ayesha Chaudhry's Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition, and Hina Azam's Sexual Violation in Islamic Law. Individually and collectively, these works shed light on the way that societies use gender as a fundamental tool of social organization and hierarchy. While Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam focus mainly on the classical Sunni Islamic tradition, their insight has wider methodological import for the study of law and religion. Further, they illuminate the intellectual diversity within the Islamic tradition, both in the past and in the present. In doing so, they draw attention to the process of how the intellectual tradition is retrieved and appropriated in contemporary contexts. Finally, their work is historical and descriptive as well as normative: this kind of scholarship challenges the distinction in the study of religion between these two categories. Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam each places her observations and arguments about classical Sunni Islamic texts and traditions in productive conversation with ethical and legal questions that Muslims face today.