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Public Scholarship, New Media, and the Future of the Humanities
Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Memorial Union, Campanile Room
8:00pm
This talk will explore the convergence of three developments in our cultural
moment: the emergence of the "public scholarship" movement, the explosive
growth of digital media, and the perceived decline in support for
traditional humanities education. New media are altering forever what it
means to "go public," extending the power of publicity by putting it into
the hands of anyone with a computer or cell phone camera. The excitement
(and outrage) surrounding new media are in marked contrast to the
simultaneous "crisis of the book," whose obsolescence is regularly
predicted. Institutions of higher education appear to be moving further
towards professional and utilitarian disciplines and away from the liberal
arts foundations of yesteryear. Are there examples of projects that combine
the community partnership ethos of public scholarship with the innovations
of new media? Can new media practices offer ways both to reenergize
humanities education and bring it more vitally into the public sphere?
Gregory Jay is the Director of the Cultures and Communities Program and
Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Jay's
research involves issues of multiculturalism and curriculum reform in
literature and American Studies. Publications include American
Literature and the Culture Wars (1997), and America the Scrivener:
Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History (1990). Jay is a
founding member of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, a coalition of
academics committed to preserving education as a force for social change and
as a site of cultural pluralism. Jay has a Ph.D. in English from
SUNY-Buffalo.
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 Gregory Jay, Director of
Cultures and Communities
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Jay's homepage at U of WI
Select Publications
(these articles and other work by Jay available for download at above
homepage)
Jay, Gregory and Sandra E. Jones. 2006. "The Grassroots Approach to
Curriculum Reform: The Cultures and Communities Program." in
Creating a New Kind of University: Institutionalizing
Community-University Engagement, eds. Stephen L. Percy, Nancy L.
Zimpher, and Mary Jane Brukardt. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.
Jay, Gregory. 2007. "Other People's Holocausts: Trauma, Empathy, and
Justice in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror."
Contemporary Literature Vol.158, No. 1:119-149.
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