May 9, 2017 was the first ever Day of Public Humanities (DayofPH). The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanity’s post-doctoral fellows Robyn Schroeder and Jim McGrath, and Inge Zwart (MA ’17) curated, organized, and hosted three events on Brown’s campus and an elaborate online discussion in order to raise the profile of the public humanities with specific attention to questions of labor within the field. In this blog post, we share our reflections on the events, show some behind-the-scenes preparations, and introduce tentative future plans.

Good morning colleagues, friends, partners, and families both logical and biological. Thank you for being with us today, and for being present and supportive during this exciting season of transition. 

We enter a campus building none of us has ever been in, slipping in as someone else exits.

We intentionally take our most frequent paths, and we describe how they feel to us and what we have seen there.

We intentionally go somewhere most of us have never been, only to find that it’s an old haunt for one member of our group.

We observe that we feel very much on campus. A block later, very much off.

The National Park Service’s (NPS) centennial has come and passed.