Supporting the global humanities with modern storytelling methods
A new public humanities major will teach students to communicate their research findings through podcasting and other digital storytelling methods.
Creating a New Global Public Humanities Undergraduate Major Track
Humans have expressed themselves through illustrations and text for thousands of years. Academics and students in the humanities have studied these expressions and communicated their findings primarily through academic essays and publications, but two faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences are developing a new major within the School of Global Studies and Languages to train students in the methodologies of the public humanities. Unlike academic papers which reach a small audience, public humanities use a range of media, such as podcasts, websites, graphic narratives, and public exhibitions, to communicate knowledge to diverse audiences.
Professor Rachel DiNitto and Professor Maram Epstein, both in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL), are developing this new Global Public Humanities major that will allow students to study the humanities and continue to develop linguistic and cultural competencies, while learning new skills to reflect a shift toward digital communication. This new major is innovative in its undergraduate and global focus; currently, most programs in the public humanities in US institutions of higher learning target graduate students and have a domestic focus.
The new major continues the traditional humanistic focus on deep cultural knowledge and interpretation while engaging local and global perspectives on issues and debates that connect international communities with local communities inside and outside the academy. As a discipline, public humanities make use of experiential learning with the goal of amplifying the voices and histories of diverse communities. As a methodology, public humanities courses train students in the craft of storytelling through a range of media and make use of experiential forms of learning and assessment.
Museums play a key role in public humanities.
We saw it as this opportunity to rethink and update the curriculum, now that we are part of the new School of Global Studies and Languages. The challenge and opportunity of joining the new school is to develop a curriculum that takes advantage of faculty strengths in the traditional humanistic fields of languages and literatures to prepare students with the skills they need to engage the challenges of the 21st century.
Maram Epstein, professor of Chinese literature
In the past, a humanities-oriented program like EALL would teach students how to read and analyze literature and then write a research paper. The public humanities program DiNitto and Epstein are developing will continue to emphasize reading and analysis but will teache students to present that knowledge in a digital medium with a wider reach, such as a website, a podcast, a series of blog posts and more.
“The public humanities really appealed to me because it’s a way for us to continue to teach the materials that we want to teach, such as film and literary texts,” says DiNitto, a professor of Japanese literature. “What we're doing is trying to break down these barriers around academia.”
In 2022, DiNitto and Epstein received a $34,513 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to begin creating the Global Public Humanities undergraduate major track. The grant provided seed funding to support the development of four courses for the major. They now have their sights on other funding sources to help finish creating the major.
One course that they’ve created is a freshman seminar that will introduce students to the public humanities by looking at examples on campus, like the current exhibit on display at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH), Outliers and Outlaws: Stories from the Eugene Lesbian History Project.
“That’s the perfect kind of public-facing public humanities project,” Epstein said about the MNCH exhibit. “One thing I'm excited about is having students map out examples of public art on campus and throughout town and think about what is and isn’t being represented.”
DiNitto and Epstein don’t have to start from scratch in developing courses. Some courses already in the School of Global Studies and Languages could be included in the new major.
The Spanish Heritage Language Program, for example, offers global public humanities courses, Epstein said. The next step for making the new major a reality is securing funding to create more courses and ensure enough courses are taught regularly for students. Both faculty members are applying for new grants with the hope that the major could launch sometime in the mid- or late-2020s. Once the global public humanities major is under way, it could be a way to encourage students to engage with texts of various ages in new ways.
“If I can get students to illustrate the symbolic patterns in a text, it will be way more fun for them,” Epstein said. “It is creative, engages them in new ways but it’s still the same kind of analysis.”
