Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis Teaches Course on Public Scholarship

We hope you folks are enjoying your summer so far! As we mentioned, AMS :: ATX is on a summer posting schedule so we can catch our breath a little bit, but not everyone is in vacation at the moment. Take a look at this brief note from Dr. Randy Lewis about a course he's teaching this summer on public scholarship:

The College of Liberal Arts asked me to create a new summer graduate seminar that began last week. “Doing Public Scholarship” is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar that will explore the quickly evolving landscape of public scholarship, which is a broader vision of what we often know as public humanities work. Focusing on the creative, intellectual and professional possibilities now emerging in the field, this intensive summer course is open to all graduate students willing to work in a fast-paced, collaborative context. Using a praxis-based approach that emphasizes doing as much as discussing, the course will culminate in a joint project that enables students to appreciate the transformative potential of public scholarship in the digital age. In addition to providing a crash-course in public scholarship skills and concepts with intellectual, creative, and job market benefits, this course will examine how public scholarship can serve a vital function in the democratization of knowledge. Including but not limited to OA journals, digital humanities projects, applied research initiatives, public intellectual blogs, academic podcasts, and oral history archives, such public scholarship allows academic knowledge to reach and cultivate new audiences. Ideally, public scholarship creates reciprocal relationships between universities and communities, serving to answer the question asked in 1939 by social scientists Robert S. and Helen Lynd: “Knowledge for What?”