Universities are increasingly asked to justify themselves in economic terms: employability, innovation, impact. Within that framework, the humanities are often placed on the defensive, expected to prove their “utility” by borrowing the language of the market. But the university’s role in producing and sustaining public knowledge—including slow, careful, historically grounded work—requires a different argument, and a different vocabulary.
Public knowledge is not only what can be counted or made immediately “accessible,” nor is it limited to what appears in open-access form. It is also a civic capacity: a society’s ability to hold complex, contested conversations about culture, history, language, and meaning without collapsing disagreement into slogans. The humanities contribute to that capacity by training habits of attention—how to read closely, how to weigh evidence, how to recognize the limits of one’s own perspective, and how to take seriously texts and traditions that do not automatically confirm what we already think.
In a moment when information is abundant but attention is scarce, the university’s commitment to sustained attention—to a poem, a novel, an archive, a historical case—is itself a public good. So is the work of translation across domains: making specialized knowledge legible beyond its narrow field, and carrying questions outward through teaching, public writing, and media forms—podcasts included—that invite non-specialists into the conversation without flattening its complexity.
This site is one small part of that effort. The writing, the podcast, and the reading lists are meant to connect academic work to readers and listeners who care about literature, culture, and the kinds of questions the humanities keep alive. The university does not own those questions. It is simply one place where they can be pursued with time and rigor—and then shared, revised, and argued over in public.
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