Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life

Imagining America is a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design. Public scholarship joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence. It includes:

• Scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners;
• Intellectual work that produces a public good;
• Artistic, critical, and historical work that contributes to public debates;
• Efforts to expand the place of public scholarship in higher education itself, including the development of new programs and research on the successes of such efforts.

Public scholarship in the arts and humanities integrates all the missions of higher education: research, teaching, service, and public engagement. Current projects include the Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, the Curriculum Project, and Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE).

"Read Between the Signs" Photo: Amara Geffen

Featured Program

Every two weeks, in this space, we feature a program at a member campus that exemplifies public scholarship in the arts, humanities and design.

Center for the Study of Public Scholarship
The Center for the Study of Public Scholarship (CSPS) at Emory University promotes and examines scholarly work that crosses the boundary between the academy and the public. Established in 1995, it is guided by the assumption that a great deal of academic scholarship has the potential to address and engage with a broad range of different communities. The CSPS explores the public nature of this scholarship and the diverse forms it can take. It brings together academic and community based scholars whose work exhibits the potential to relate to one another and provides a space where models can be developed for collaborative scholarship that connects knowledge produced inside and outside of academic institutions.

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