Doors, Departments, and the Public Humanities (original) (raw)

A week before the MLA 2014 Presidential Forum on the public humanities in vulnerable times, I walked through the corridors of the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature, reading doors. I had decided not to look at my most public projects but to undertake instead a reading of the departmental space on campus, a space to which I have had the longest association. Ours is a big-tent English department in a passionately interdisciplinary and historically decentralized public research university. Many members of the department (myself included) are jointly appointed in at least one other department. Our ways of being public are as varied as our multiple affiliations. I do not see us as representative of some typical way of being an English department, though no doubt we are. Rather, I see this forum as an opportunity to argue that every department, in its own Profession -Doors, Departments, and the Public Humanities