English PhD in the Public Humanities

Overview

The University of Wyoming’s English PhD in the Public Humanities is a dynamic degree designed to prepare students for publicly engaged careers beyond colleges and universities. We believe that the project of the humanities is to do work in the world. Building from the National Humanities Alliance’s description of the humanities, our program aims to engage the public in conversations that inform contemporary debates, magnify community perspectives, preserve local cultures, and expand educational access. In these ways, our program prioritizes public advocacy and community engagement with a curricular focus at the intersections of humanities research and methodologies, rhetorical analysis, and critical reading that is traditional to English Studies.

Exemplifying a new kind of public-facing English degree, our trail-blazing Public Humanities PhD will serve as a national exemplar in a new and exciting field of Public Humanities study. Students can expect to pursue innovative and applied coursework, to conduct research and produce substantive public-facing projects, to engage local, state, national, and global publics, and to build partnerships with public sector organizations. This work prepares students for careers in public advocacy, arts programming, and non-profit work. In short, the English PhD in the Public Humanities provides students with knowledge, skills, and professional networks necessary to realize a broad range of professional goals.

The degree is designed to be flexible, rewarding curiosity and offering ample space for creative pursuits. In consultation with faculty advisors, students design their own courses of study, develop a comprehensive public engagement project, and produce a non-traditional doctoral project with relevance beyond academia, and which advances their own interests. Students have opportunity to attend full-time or part-time. All admitted full time students are fully funded for up to four years. 

Our faculty are nationally and internally recognized experts in narrative and storytelling, civic discourse and public engagement, cultural and critical studies, creative non-fiction, critical theory, and film/media studies. This offers students opportunities to deepen their understandings of the world and, importantly, affords possibilities to bridge academic and public work that is at the heart of the public humanities. The UW English PhD recognizes that traditional graduate mentoring models won’t help us to creatively meet urgent public needs. In our program, students take the lead in designing projects that matter to them while working with faculty as collaborators and consultants. The doctorate in English/Public Humanities at UW infuses innovative public work with the theoretical and methodological rigor that characterizes impactful academic scholarship.

Applications due on or before February 1.

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Program Spotlight: Great Courses: A Literary Tour of the United States

In this 24-episode documentary series, Dr. Arielle Zibrak takes viewers on an epic excursion across America: from the wide expanse of the continental states to Alaska, Hawaii, and beyond, delving into the jewels of writing that distinguish our nation’s literature across three centuries. The series explores the literature from various regions of the United States and reflects a wide spectrum of the American experience, from the European settlers, immigrants, and urban elites to the lives of African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and more.

 

The Great Courses documentary series is just one of many interrelated public humanities projects of Professor Zibrak’s that utilize the affordances of different media to explore 19th and 20th-century literature, gender, sexuality and popular culture including the digital Rebecca Davis Harding Archive and the edited collection Twelve Stories by American Women.

Program Spotlight: Re-Storying the West

Re-Storying the West, led by Associate Professor Nancy Small, sits at three overlapping knowledge-making traditions: Field Rhetorics, Oral History, and Indigenist Storywork Ethics. While much of Wyoming’s story is told through the “romance of the West,” “the dangerous adventure of the frontier,” and “the solace of wide-open spaces,” this story project asks: Who has the power and means to tell our stories? What stories count as valid? What stories survive over time? 

 

Re-Storying the West seeks to amplify the untold Wyoming by gathering contemporary stories of everyday Wyomingites, from rural and city communities, from individuals of all stripes, backgrounds, and professions, and from voices we don't often hear through collaborative conversational interviews produced into sharable stories for public consumption.

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