Careers & Projects in the Public Humanities

Session Submission Type: Professional Development Workshop

Abstract

This Professional Development session focuses on the centrality of infrastructure-building to careers in the public humanities. In particular, we propose a conversation exploring this essential yet under theorized competency and the ways in which it enables interdisciplinary, public-facing arts and humanities work to remain accountable to their publics. Such projects aren’t evaluated on their intellectual grounds, or impact, alone, but rather by the institutional arrangements that determine what counts for credit, or tenure, which collaborations become legible, and which audiences can be reached. The National Academies describes this as a persistent drag generated by promotion and reward regimes and department-based budgeting despite institutions’ public endorsement of interdisciplinarity. In a moment of intensifying pressure on shared governance and curricular authority, infrastructure-building becomes an urgent professional skill. Thus, developing governance and credit practices, ethical risk planning, audience design, and dissemination pathways that align scholarly freedom with fiscal forms will be increasingly necessary to assure that educational work is sustained in public.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Rebecca Peabody, Getty Research Institute

Panelists

• Rebecca Peabody, Getty Research Institute

• Byron Wilson, Our Testimonial Inc.

• Virginia Loh-Hagan, San Diego State University

• Alvin Henry, San Diego State University

Biographical Information

Byron Wilson is a designer, artist, and researcher whose work sustains a dual professional identity: a practitioner of design working inside healthcare systems through research and development, and an arts and humanities scholar attentive to how images, narrative, and institutions contour ethical life. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Design, College of Fine Arts, at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has held the Lee Hage Jamail Regents Professorship in Fine Arts (2023–2025) and the Foxworth Centennial Professorship (2022), and he is a visiting scholar at Tufts University. Situated within a disciplinary tradition in which studio practice and scholarship are mutually constitutive, Byron treats design research and image-making as coequal methods for studying how care and power shape meaning.


Rebecca Peabody earned a joint PhD from Yale University in the History of Art and African American Studies, and is Head of Research Projects & Academic Outreach at the Getty Research Institute. Her scholarly publications include the award-winning Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race (2016), as well as five edited or co-edited volumes on art and visual culture in a global context, including Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (2022), Visualizing Empire: Africa, France, and the Politics of Representation (2021), Lawrence Alloway, Critic and Curator (2015), Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945 – 1980 (2011), and Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945 – 1975 (2011). She has taught at Loyola Marymount University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Southern California, and Yale University.