Call for Papers: Engaging the Local Public Humanities in St. Louis Colloquium & Workshop
Colloquium Date: April 18, 2025
Location: Washington University in St. Louis
Deadline for Submissions: March 18, 2025

Much of the discourse on graduate humanities programs in recent years has gestured towards the notion of “public humanities.” But for many graduate students, this notion remains vague: exactly who constitutes the “public?” What opportunities exist to meaningfully engage the public in humanities scholarship, especially in a culture that is growing increasingly isolated, anti-intellectual, and critical of the academy? Above all, how does the notion of public humanities challenge one of academia’s oldest unquestioned hierarchies: that of the relationship between “town” and “gown?” This project seeks to open up a space for graduate students to share their experiences with public humanities by particularly emphasizing the notion of local humanities–that is, not just how our research reaches out beyond the walls of the university, but also how it makes concrete impacts—positive or negative—on the communities we are embedded in.

For this colloquium, we are seeking paper proposals for two themed panels: one panel that is focused on research and the other on pedagogy. The research panel will emphasize more how our work in the humanities engages, collaborates with, and acts upon our local community. The pedagogy panel will emphasize how we relay, communicate, and teach our research to our local communities. We invite presentations from anyone who has engaged in a local public humanities project during their graduate career, with preference given to those who have conducted a local humanities project within St. Louis or surrounding areas in Missouri and Illinois. We are accepting submissions to those who are no longer graduate students, such as postdocs, professors, and independent scholars, so long as they completed their public humanities projects while still in graduate studies.

In their abstracts and presentations, we encourage participants to share their practical experience with local humanities projects (what was unexpected, challenging, invigorating?) alongside the theoretical frameworks that their work engages with (for instance, if your work in queer theory, public sphere theory, the digital humanities, etc inspired you to take your work beyond the borders of a college campus).

A fitting proposal for this colloquium will narrate one’s experience with a local humanities project, discuss how it can help us reimagine graduate education, and offer ethical guidelines of how we position ourselves as scholars within our local community. We are open to multiple modalities of presentation. Your talk could be a traditional slide presentation, or you could propose posters, gallery talks, maps, or digital archives. We are open to presentations formats you believe will best showcase your engagement with public humanities. 

For full consideration, please submit an abstract (no more than 500 words) by March 18. Proposals submitted after this date will be considered only on an as-needs basis.

Submission guidelines:
❖ Be sure to attach your abstract as a Word or PDF file.
❖ Email your abstract to hender.m.j@wustl.edu with the subject headline “Engaging the Local Humanities Proposal.”
❖ Mark which panel your proposal is for in your email.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Michael Henderson at hender.m.j@wustl.edu .