Category Archives: undergraduate research

How to Institutionalize Public Humanities Programs

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I was happy this week to have a new essay out in the newly minted journal Public Humanities, from Cambridge UP. It’s my own reflection on the importance of institutions to successful work in academia, and especially to the effort to sustain Public Humanities projects, which notoriously exist precariously on the blood, sweat and tears of a weary professor or two hoping they can beg, borrow, and steal enough funding for one more year. We live in an anti-institutional age. Perhaps we always have, though it has seemed particularly easy of late to think that sneering at institutions and their mores and traditions is a revolutionary act in and of itself, an attitude shared not only by not a few of the denizens of the current administration, but not a few professors on both ends of the political spectrum. The essay as a whole is what it looks like–a how to bit on ways to approach your institution so that your work can become just a little more of the day to day operation rather than the mad scramble for resources that academic life mostly is these days. The conclusion is a little bit more of a personal reflection on our inveterate suspicion of institutions in America an life and how managing that suspicion is as much a part of an intellectual project as any other aspect of what we do. I include that piece here, but hope you’ll look up the whole thing at your leisure.

I’ll conclude with encouragement to not just know and tell your institution’s story well. Be sure to know yourself. When I was first asked to do some writing and speaking on “institutionalizing public humanities programs,” I read the word “institutionalizing” with a sudden catch in my throat. My thoughts, unbeknownst to those who asked me to speak, went immediately to my father. Having been moved to a dementia care unit after he had descended some way into the fatal grip of Alzheimer’s, he had a conversation one day with my mother, the one family member whom he still recognized. My mom asked him if he knew what was happening to him. He replied, “Well, I know I’ve been institutionalized.”

This memory is personal, but it does speak to a larger discourse about which we remain uneasy. In our culture, the “institutional” man or woman is not the one who gets the romantic lead in books and movies. From Huck Finn to Animal House, from Invisible Man to Girl Interrupted, institutions and their operations can signify loss of freedom, loss of creativity, loss of passion, and loss, indeed, of identity. They signify death. Subconsciously, we assume that institutions restrain. Depending on them, we think, means losing something more vibrant and visionary than what we would do if given the time and resources, especially if we were left to our own devices. Sometimes, lurking unacknowledged beneath the question of how our important projects can become institutional priorities lies the unstated question, “How can I get the resources to do what I want to do and be left alone to do it in the way I think it ought to be done?”

My disappointingly short answer to that question is, “You can’t.” One part of institutionalizing our passions is a long-term negotiation, not just with our institutions but with ourselves. Successful programs are born, not least, through a process of giving up some measure of control, and some measure even of our own dreams, in the hope that they can become something larger. Institutionalizing what we do is, in part, figuring out how our stories, practices, and passions can be meshed with–and sometimes substantially altered by–the stories, practices, and desires of these entities we call institutions. Institutionalization means coming to terms with the fact that our individual dreams will not be realized through institutions. But dreams of various sorts can be realized and sustained as they are manifested through collaboration with our institutions, our community partners, our students, fellow faculty, and many others on the road to becoming realized as a public humanities project. That project will not be what we originally imagined it might be, but perhaps, in the end, it will be more than we could have hoped.

Powers PK. How to Institutionalize Public Humanities Projects. Public Humanities. 2025;1:e46. doi:10.1017/pub.2024.64

Annotating Kierkegaard; an intellectual’s appreciation

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I am largely an intellectual because of Soren Kierkegaard.  I mean this primarily in terms of intellectual biography rather than genealogy.  A few days ago I noted briefly my own vocational journey into English at the hands of T.S. Eliot.  That is a true tale. However, at Eliot’s hands and through English alone as an undergraduate I largely wanted to be the next great poet or novelist.  Kierkegaard taught me to think, or at least taught me that thinking was something a Christian could do, ought to do, with whatever capacity God had given him.  Through Kierkegaard I came to Walker Percy, subject of my undergraduate thesis, and then John Updike, subject of my first scholarly essay, and probably too to literary and cultural theory which became a field of my doctoral studies and has remained a passion.   His writerly creativity, his playfulness with language image and authorial personae, never let me believe that critical writing was the inherent inferior to fiction, even if it is often practiced poorly.

In honor of Kierkegaard’s birthday yesterday, I took down some of my old SK from the shelf and blew the dust off.  The old Walter Lowrie paperback editions that were 3.95 back in the day.  The rapturous and pious annotations that fill the margins are now cringe-inducing, but I am reminded of the passions an intellectual engagement deeply felt can arouse.  A lot of the passages are marked over in four or five different colors of highlights and underlining, a way of trying to keep track, I suspect, of the many different readings I gave those book back in the day, a way of tracking the different person I was becoming.  And if I now have moved a long way from those Kierkegaardian roots in to other hipper modes of thinking, I’m also of an age where I’ve started realizing that the newest thing is not necessarily a mark of the best thing, maybe only showing you what you already knew without realizing it rather than what you need to know.

I still think The Great Dane wears well.  His comments on sectarianism, as well as his more general clarity about easy piety, say something to our own age as equally as his.  And, I still wonder sometimes, deep down, whether my first love was not the best.

From Fear and Trembling:

The true knight of faith is always absolute isolation, the false knight is sectarian. This sectarianism is an attempt to leap away from the narrow path of the paradox and become a tragic hero at a cheap price. The tragic hero expresses the universal and sacrifices himself for it. The sectarian punchinello, instead of that, has a private theatre, i.e. several good friends and comrades who represent the universal just about as well as the beadles in The Golden Snuffbox represent justice. The knight of faith, on the contrary, is the paradox, is the individual, absolutely nothing but the individual, without connections or pretensions. This is the terrible thing which the sectarian manikin cannot endure. For instead of learning from this terror that he is not capable of performing the great deed and then plainly admitting it (an act which I cannot but approve, because it is what I do) the manikin thinks that by uniting with several other manikins he will be able to do it. But that is quite out of the question. In the world of spirit no swindling is tolerated. A dozen sectaries join arms with one another, they know nothing whatever of the lonely temptations which await the knight of faith and which he dares not shun precisely because it would be still more dreadful if he were to press forward presumptuously. The sectaries deafen one another by their noise and racket, hold the dread off by their shrieks, and such a hallooing company of sportsmen think they are storming heaven and think they are on the same path as the knight of faith who in the solitude of the universe never hears any human voice but walks alone with his dreadful responsibility.

The knight of faith is obliged to rely upon himself alone, he feels the pain of not being able to make himself intelligible to others, but he feels no vain desire to guide others. The pain is his assurance that he is in the right way, this vain desire he does not know, he is too serious for that. The false knight of faith readily betrays himself by this proficiency in guiding which he has acquired in an instant. He does not comprehend what it is all about, that if another individual is to take the same path, he must become entirely in the same way the individual and have no need of any man’s guidance, least of all the guidance of a man who would obtrude himself. At this point men leap aside, they cannot bear the martyrdom of being uncomprehended, and instead of this they choose conveniently enough the worldly admiration of their proficiency. The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and therein lies his deep humanity, which is worth a good deal more than this silly participation in others’ weal and woe which is honored by the name of sympathy, whereas in fact it is nothing but vanity. He who would only be a witness thereby avows that no man, not even the lowliest, needs another man’s sympathy or should be abased that another may be exalted. But since he did not win what he won at a cheap price, neither does he sell it out at a cheap price, he is not petty enough to take men’s admiration and give them in return his silent contempt, he knows that what is truly great is equally accessible to all.

Either there is an absolute duty toward God, and if so it is the paradox here described, that the individual as the individual is higher than the universal and as the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute / or else faith never existed, because it has always existed, or, to put it differently, Abraham is lost.

Takeaways–NITLE Seminar: Undergraduates Collaborating in Digital Humanities Research

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Yesterday afternoon at 3:00 about 30 Messiah College humanities faculty and undergraduates gathered to listen in on and virtually participate in the NITLE Seminar focusing on Undergraduates Collaborating in Digital Humanities Research.  A number of our faculty and students were tweeting the event, and a Storify version with our contributions can be found here.I am amazed and gratified to have such a showing late on a Friday afternoon.  Students and faculty alike were engaged and interested by the possibilities they saw being pursued in undergraduate programs across the country, and our own conversation afterwards extended for more than a half hour beyond the seminar itself. Although most of us freely admit that we are only at the beginning and feeling our way, there was a broad agreement that undergraduate research and participation in Digital Humanities work was something we needed to keep pushing on.

If you are interested in reviewing the entire seminar, including chat room questions and the like, you can connect through this link.  I had to download webex in order to participate in the seminar, so you may need to do the same, even though the instructions I received said I wouldn’t need to.  My own takeaways from the seminar were as follows:

  • Undergraduates are scholars, not scholars in waiting.  If original scholarship is defined as increasing the fund of human knowledge, discovering and categorizing and interpreting data that helps us better understand human events and artifacts, developing tools that can be employed by other scholars who can explore and confirm or disconfirm or further your findings, these young people are scholars by any definition.
  • Digital Humanities research extends (and, to be sure, modifies) our traditional ways of doing humanities work;  it does not oppose it.  None of these young scholars felt inordinate tensions between their traditional humanities training and their digital humanities research.  A student who reviewed a database of 1000 Russian folks tales extended and modified her understanding arrived at by the close reading of a dozen.  Digital Humanities tools enable closer reading and better contextual understanding of the poet Agha Shahid Ali, rather than pushing students away in to extraneous material.
  • Many or most of these students learned their tools as they went along, within the context of what they were trying to achieve.  I was especially fascinated that a couple of the students had had no exposure to Digital Humanities work prior to their honors projects, and they learned the coding and digital savvy they needed as they went along.  Learning tools within the context of how they are needed seems to make more and more sense to me.  You would not teach a person how to use a hammer simply by giving them a board and nails, at least not if you don’t want them to get bored.  Rather, give them something to build, and show or have them figure out how the hammer and nails will help them get there.

I’m looking forward to the Places We’ll Go.