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Articles and Resources

We're always on the lookout for interesting articles and resources that address the value of the Humanities. Explore our links below, and keep up-to-date with the current debate within the academic community and beyond.

• Guest Post: Richard Fisher on The Monograph: Keep On Keepin’ On*, Part Two
• November 16th 2015, The Scholarly Kitchen
  I have to confess that I drafted an initial version of this posting and then tore it up. Some friendly external comments, and some of the interactions I experienced during Academic Book Week here in the UK, convinced me that I needed to think afresh and a lot more clearly about the intermediaries that currently glue academic authors, publishers, and readers together.
• Guest Post: Richard Fisher on The Monograph: Keep On Keepin’ On*, Part One
  November 10th 2015, The Scholarly Kitchen
  This is the first part of a two-part guest posting looking at historic trends, current challenges, and future possibilities for monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, Richard aims to address a number of enduring misunderstandings among academic researchers and the failure of publishers to address them effectively. While many of the perspectives reflect the British experience, the posting is intended to be (at least) transatlantic in appeal, and its release is timed to coincide with University Press Week in North America, and Academic Book Week in the United Kingdom.
• Sarah Churchwell: why the humanities matter
  November 13th 2014, Times Higher Education
  Ahead of the Being Human festival, the professor of American literature considers their importance
• Humanities are vital, science is vital. Stop treating them as opposites
  November 12th 2015, The Guardian
  This week, the ‘Being Human’ Festival of the Humanities launches in London.Athene Donald argues that we must avoid seeing Humanities in opposition to Science.
• Book Review: The Academic Book of the Future edited by Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner
  November 12th 2015, LSE Review of Books
  Edited by Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner, members of ‘The Academic Book of the Future’ investigative team, The Academic Book of the Future presents a short collection of essays by academics, publishers, booksellers and librarians ruminating on the future of the academic book. With the book published through the Palgrave Pivot initiative, Leah Tetherwelcomes its content and physical form for offering an illuminating insight into the unfolding of the project and a reflection of its future valuable contributions to debates over the academic book.
• Times Higher Education: What is the future of the academic book?
  November 12th 2015, Times Higher Education
  A new collection brings together the perspectives of academics, publishers, librarians and booksellers to chart likely directions for the academic book.
• The Academic Book of the Future
  November 6th 2015, UKSG Insights
  A blog post on the how, what, and why The Academic Book of the Future came about from Samantha Raynor and Marilyn Deegan.
• The latest New Gen Thinkers have been announced - congrats to our author Nadine Muller for being one of the ten!
  BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) today at Hay Festival unveiled the 10 academics - and their research - who will be New Generation Thinkers 2015.
• World University Rankings 2015-2016 by subject: arts and humanities results announced
  October 22nd 2015, Times Higher Education
  The UK has stood its ground in this year’s Times Higher Education ranking for arts and humanities subjects, amid mounting pressure from continental Europe.
• Humanities needs overhaul to stress ‘benefits for industry’
  October 19th 2015, Times Higher Education
  The value of the humanities to business is underestimated, but few departments are able to demonstrate relevance of studies to industry, Singapore audience is told
• Humanities research is groundbreaking, life-changing… and ignored
  October 19th 2015, The Guardian
  Humanities scholars are making strides in sectors from sustainability to robotics – why are so few people aware of their work?
• Alarm Over Huge Cuts to Humanities and Social Sciences at Japanese Universities
  September 16th 2015, TIME
  More than two dozen Japanese universities have announced that they will reduce or altogether eliminate their academic programs in the humanities and social sciences, following a dictum from Tokyo to focus on disciplines that “better meet society’s needs.”
• Humanities under attack
  August 23rd 2015, The Japan Times
  HIKONE, SHIGA PREFECTURE – On June 8, all presidents of national universities received a notice from the education minister telling them to either abolish their undergraduate departments and graduate schools devoted to the humanities and social sciences or shift their curricula to fields with greater utilitarian values.
• Move over science, humanities’ tech-savvy research is making waves
  August 5th 2015, The Guardian
  When you think of research on the cutting edge of technological change or bringing in investment from business you are more likely to think of engineering than history.
• Real impact is about influence , meaning and value: Mapping contributions for a new impact agenda in the humanities
  July 27th 2015, LSE Impact Blog
  The humanities are driven both by epistemological and normative interests in a range of topics resulting in a complex topography of the public value of the humanities. But for the most part, its diffuse knowledge and impact has been defined and restricted to inputs and outputs. David Budtz Pedersen presents an overview of a research project aiming to reveal the pathways of humanities research deeply integrated in the functioning and affluence of modern liberal societies...
• Time for a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track
  June 2nd 2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education
  In our recently published book, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom, we argue that the crisis in American academe has nothing to do with the intellectual content of research and teaching in the humanities, and everything to do with the labor conditions of most American college professors...
• Technologies of Memory: Digitization and the Future of the Nineteenth Century
  May 17th 2015, The Humanities Initiative at NYU
  What is the archive of the nineteenth-century history of reading? And what will be its content and contours in the wake of wide-scale digitization? To address these questions, this talk looks in two directions: first, at the evidence of use in individual nineteenth-century books and, second, at the changing nature of academic research libraries after Google. Out of copyright, non-rare, and often fragile due to poor paper quality, nineteenth-century printed books are both richly served and particularly imperiled in the new media ecosystem. As scenes of evidence, they are at once exposed and occluded by the digitization of our library collections...

• New Career Paths?
  15th May 2015, Inside Higher Ed
  For decades now, humanities scholars and advocates have been talking about the “crisis” in their disciplines...
• The Professor Divide at American Universities and How to Fix It — The Case for a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track
  14th April 2015, LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog
  The casual hiring of non-permanent teaching staff is a pressing issue for universities in the U.S. and the U.K. Jennifer Ruth focuses her analysis on U.S. universities in particular and shows to what extent this now common practice is deprofessionalizing the academic profession...
• The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth
  9th April 2015, Times Higher Education
  Thomas Docherty on a study of the academy today and working conditions...
• The War Again Humanities at Britian's Universities
  29th March 2015, The Guardian
  Higher education is stuffed with overpaid administrators squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of lecturers and focusing on the ‘profitable’ areas of science, technology, engineering and maths. Are the humanities at risk of being wiped out?
• Health Humanities: We Are Here to Collaborate, Not to Compete
  30th March 2015, The Guardian
  The rise of this new discipline signals a willingness to be more inclusive and cross-disciplinary and take a traditional subject in unusual new directions...
• New Model of Tenure
  March 10th 2015, Inside Higher Ed
  Thanks largely to adjunct activists throughout North America, there is a growing awareness outside academe that colleges and universities are treating faculty members off the tenure track in deplorable ways...
• Who Gets a Vote in Departmental Decisions?
  March 2nd 2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education
  How an opportunity to hire a tenure-track faculty member went awry...

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