About the Public Humanities Program
As part of our comprehensive vision of civic life that touches on multiple disciplines and academic endeavors, Tisch College is committed to fostering civic engagement in the humanities and the arts. To that end, we support public humanities, a field of scholarship and an advocacy movement with particular importance in our political and cultural moment. Its work involves such collaborative practices as historical inquiry, recovery, and acknowledgment, as well as innovative uses of narrative and artistic expression to produce civically minded, creative, and just mutual engagements among a broad range of constituencies. Tisch College contributes its expertise to the development of public humanities by supporting teaching, projects, and programming at Tufts, in our host communities, nationally, and internationally.
Tisch College has particular strengths and perspectives that allow us to make distinctive contributions to the field of Public Humanities. We are at the forefront of building the new discipline of Civic Studies, a field that draws extensively on the humanities and involves explicit consideration of ethical issues. Since the fall of 2018, Tufts has offered a new major in Civic Studies - the first of its kind at any academic institution - which gives students the opportunity to examine the significance of critical reflection, ethical thinking, and action for social change, within and between societies, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Public humanities and arts are very much involved in these forms of civic engagement and advocacy, and in the future will become one of the paths through which students can pursue this new major.