This page showcases my work in the public humanities, including recent and upcoming events.
I first encountered the terminology and concept of public scholarship when I served as co-chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (2008-11). As the term I initially adopted for this work, public scholarship is the one I have used most often, although I have chosen community-engaged scholarship to title this page as it best conveys the range of activities featured. Other terms in current use include public humanities, community-engaged learning, and community engagement. No doubt other terms will evolve as practices within higher education and expectations of the communities with which universities should be integrally connected evolve. The pandemic, new forms of digital engagement, and a new sense of urgency around humanistic values accelerate growth and development in this sphere.
What is certain is that the value of literary study extends beyond the classroom, and scholarly administrators with humanities expertise can—and should—use their position to advance goals analogous to those of public scholarship. An environment of robust public humanities engagement serves campus and regional communities, fulfilling mission and fostering ethical and civic engagement.
Humanities Engagement in the Red River Valley
The Red River Valley (RRV) is part of Northwest Minnesota’s regional self-identification, and it encompasses a host of peoples and histories. This sense of shared identity became the focus of my annual Minnesota author visit and book talk, inaugurated when I became the senior vice chancellor. With the annual book talk as a throughline, related events have been woven in as part of a program of humanities engagement aimed at situating and affirming each of the region’s heritage identities as one of many sharing contemporary experience of the RRV. We have offered programming, increased collaboration with area community organizations, and cultivated a broader audience for the humanities in a rural setting. These public events build important bridges for learning between the campus and the community; they also build connective bridges among varied constituencies to foster shared learning and mutual respect.
This ongoing program of humanities engagement has its intellectual roots in the concurrences theory of Swedish scholar Gunlög Fur, who argues that “if land is the bearer of histories [it might] open up possibilities of interpretation and learning by all who cross the terrain and are willing to engage with its various layers.” Such work is where the humanities excel.
The 2023 and 2024 book talks (with Marcie Rendon and Sarah Stonich, respectively) were held in a community location in downtown Crookston, while the third was held on campus and scheduled to coordinate with the opening reception for a week-long exhibition of original art inspired by traditional Swedish and Norwegian folk art. Campus and community audiences for these events overlapped with the audiences for a March 2025 Fiber Arts Celebration that showcased textile arts culture in rural Minnesota. The post-event surveys sent to the 2025 book talk audience showed the region is receptive to such programming. I look forward to continuing the author visit series, and to coordinating with community partners on related arts and humanities events.
Celebrating the Red River Valley’s history through art (UMN, March 2026)
I appeared on KROX’s Valley Talk radio program on October 9, 2025, to discuss the author visit with Kari Lie Dorer and the art gallery opening for contemporary folk artist Pieper Fleck Bloomquist.
Public Scholarship in the Humanities
My introduction to the concept of public scholarship—as opposed to outreach or service—helped me put a name to work I was already doing. The concept also provided a framework for increasingly deliberate public engagement and, later, successful grant writing and publications about public scholarship. My article addressing how to make the case for appropriate credit for public scholarship in university evaluation structures, “Public Scholarship: Making the Case,” came out in Modern Language Studies in 2015. In 2021, Rachel Arteaga and I published a co-edited volume, Public Scholarship in Literary Studies. The collection concludes with my essay, “Literary Study Writ Large,” and the cover design uses my photo. I am proud to bring out work on this topic via the Amherst College Press peer-reviewed, digital-first, open-access platform.
Watch videos and read more about the launch event
Crime Fiction
I wrote an essay on the feminist worldviews of Swedish women crime writers Camilla Läckberg, Liza Marklund, and Helene Tursten for the Los Angeles Review of Books (2016).
As part of a campus-community film series Crime, Capers, and Corruption, I served as discussion panelist for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. My discussion background and suggested related reading are on the PDF.
“Thinking Through Crime: F. Tennyson Jesse.” Mystery Tribune (Spring 2017): 140-53.
“The Handmaid’s Tale as Historical Fiction.” Theme week on Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. In Media Res: a mediacommons project. May 3, 2017.
“Gone Girl as Domestic Noir,” public seminar. Event sponsored by GSU College of Arts and Sciences. Zoom, March 10, 2021.
“A Crime for Every Occasion,” GSU Facebook Live event, June 8, 2021. Book list (PDF)
Veterans NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War
In the spring of 2017, I received funding from the NEH program Dialogues on the Experience of War with project co-director Andrae Marak, then Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at GSU. Our project, “War, Trauma, and the Humanities,” unrolled over the course of the 2017-18 academic year. The centerpiece of the project was a for-credit class, run under an English programs special topics number, which featured a team of five student-veteran discussion facilitators. The student-veterans were selected in a competitive process and for the six weeks prior to class, the project directors conducted training that introduced some of the humanities materials and offered pedagogical foundations and practice. We created a hashtag for use on social media to bring content into the class and to share externally the important work taking place in the program.
Chicago regional coverage of the project includes articles in the Daily Southtown (4/14/17) and the Citizen Suburban Times (9/27/17). Dennis Sullivan, author of the April story on the project, visited class in November for a follow-up story in the Daily Southtown (11/10/17). The Michigan State University College of Arts & Letters (10/12/17) published an alumna profile of me that focuses on the project, and GSU’s Angela Denk wrote a profile of the student-veteran team for the GSU Newsroom (10/30/17).
The culminating event of the class, “Veterans Speak: War, Trauma, and the Humanities,” was recorded in the GSU TV studios on December 4, 2017:
In May 2018, student-veteran team member Victor Garcia gave the central address for the Crete, Illinois Memorial Day observances, an honor he lived up to with an eloquent speech.
Project co-director Andrae Marak and I were thrilled to be awarded a second grant from the NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War program. We led a year-long series of activities on the theme of “War Memory and Commemoration in the Humanities,” including a for-credit course taught during the fall semester using the same model as the 2017 grant with embedded student-veteran discussion facilitators. We observed the centenary of the end of the First World War with a full day of humanities programming on the Monday after Veterans Day. Held in various locations on campus, the day’s events included a poetry discussion, a panel of student-veteran and student participants from both grant years sharing WW1 text selections and commentary, an open house at the Veterans Resource Center, screening of a documentary film made by a student-veteran, and a guided tour of the veteran art exhibit curated as part of the grant project.
During the spring of 2019, grant-trained teams of student-veterans and students engaged the public through a series of site visits. On February 26, we held an event at Prairie State College, and on March 19 a veterans-only team visited the Benjamin O. Davis VFW Post 311 in Richton Park, Illinois. In April, humanities discussions took place at Purdue University Northwest in Hammond, Indiana, and at the Matteson, Illinois, public library. The format for all of these events was a panel presentation of selected humanities materials, discussion, then audience reading and engagement with several poems, followed by informal conversations and networking. We were pleased and grateful to have some audience members attend multiple events.
CONTRIBUTING TO THE CONVERSATION:
In February of 2018, I gave a talk on our grant-project work as public humanities at the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities (sponsored by UW Scandinavian Studies and the Fielding Endowment for Norwegian Studies). In May, I was one of two project directors invited to offer “notes from the field” during the public portion of the NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War project directors’ meetings in Washington, D.C., sharing project successes and lessons learned to new grant recipients and a public audience. Project co-director Andrae Marak and I have presented together on our NEH grant projects at two scholarly conferences: we offered a 45-minute roundtable at the World History Association Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in June, 2018, and were part of a panel at the War, Literature & Arts Conference at the Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado in September, 2018. At the January 2019 Modern Language Assocation (MLA) Convention, I presented “Public Scholarship: In Person, In Print,” which drew on the NEH project as an exemplar of what the public humanities can accomplish through direct, in-person engagement.
Broader ongoing dissemination addressing veterans-focused public humanities theory and practice include:
“Student-Veterans Leading Change through Humanities Engagement on Campus and in the Community.” Presentation with A. Marak. Engagement Scholarship Consortium 2023 International Conference. East Lansing, Michigan, October 2023
“Working Together: Veterans Resources in the Library, the Classroom, and the Community. Presentation with J. Sopiarz. Libraries and Veterans National Forum. Virtual conference, September 2021.
“‘Bigger than the Classroom’: Student-Veterans with/as Adult Learners Studying the Humanities.” Presentation with A. Marak. CAEL Virtual Conference, November 2020.
“Expanding Audiences for Student-Veteran Humanities Programs through Campus-Community Partnerships.” National Humanities Conference. Honolulu, Hawaii, November 2019.
“Fostering Student-Veteran Success through the Humanities.” Presentation with K. Smith and A. Marak. American Association of State Colleges and Universities Academic Affairs Summer Meeting. Minneapolis, July 2019.
Program Spotlight: Fostering Student-Veteran Success through the Humanities. Invited speaker, with Kevin Smith and Andrae Marak, at CAEL’s Veterans Higher Education Affinity Group, Malcolm X College, December 10, 2019.