People are finding digital worlds increasingly satisfying- often at the expense of embodied, social, multi-sensory experiences. The recent global pandemic only heightened this trajectory for our current students, where the virtual replaced “IRL” in almost every part of their lives. As undergraduate educators, we need to seek ways to effectively teach students how to have multi-sensory experiences, how to use these experiences to probe their own intellectual, social, and emotional assumptions and understandings, and how to use this reflexive element to develop empathy for others. As an archaeologist teaching in local cemeteries, Dr. Jane Baxter (Professor of Anthropology, DePaul University) brings students into spaces that are filled with art, history, and multicultural understandings of “big human questions” about life and death in secular and religious contexts. Dr. Baxter will share an exercise she developed to engage students in a multi-sensory exploration of cemetery spaces that has become foundational for their learning.

This presentation explores best practices in creating Ethnographic Theater in the Humanities college classroom. Dr. Ina Kelleher (Assistant Professor, Contra Costa College), will discuss how to develop relationships between students and community stakeholders to tell stories based on their shared lived experiences. Questions we will explore include: How does the lens of performance, as embodied action, help us understand our shared humanity? By grounding firmly in the local, what do we learn about the global and even, the universal in ethnographic theater? And finally, how does storytelling encourage civic engagement and help us imagine a better world? This workshop will provide a template for devising dramatic monologues and scenes based on interviews, group story-telling exercises, and Theater of the Oppressed games to create vibrant, public facing, theatrical works.

This presentation showcases a collaborative ePortfolio project developed for a Study Away course, LGBTQ+ Organizational Culture in the PNW. Cross-listed in Communication, Queer Studies, and English, the course invited students to explore how identity and organizational communication theory intersected within media and tech organizations in Seattle. The culminating assignment asked students to co-create a public-facing ePortfolio using Wix, incorporating multimedia gallery entries and personal “Highlight” reflections. Designed to queer traditional academic authorship, the project emphasized collective storytelling and multimodal expression. Through immersive site visits and sensory documentation (e.g. photos, sound clips, and affective insights) students transformed abstract concepts into embodied, experiential learning. The result is a powerful model for rooting digital storytelling in lived experience, while affirming the humanities’ role in justice-oriented public engagement. Presenters Alison Lietzenmayer (Master Lecturer, Old Dominion University) and Dr. Megan Mize (Director of ePortfolios and Digital Initiatives, Old Dominion University) will share the project framework, assignment design, and practical strategies for integrating collaborative reflection and public scholarship into immersive courses.

Each summer, undergraduate interns at Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, CT participate In a Perspectives in Public Humanities seminar course, engaging in readings, discussion, and conversations with public humanities professionals at the Museum and at cultural institutions across Southeastern New England. This course is structured to mirror upper-level undergraduate and early graduate coursework, and provide a theoretical and perspectives-based companion to each intern's hands-on project work across the Museum. In this presentation, Bridget DeLaney-Hall (Associate Curator, Mystic Seaport Museum), will highlight the value of pairing theoretical exploration with practical skill building in situ at cultural institutions and offer a complimentary model to academic-centered coursework, while emphasizing the opportunities for humanities education outside of traditional academic institutions.

Dr. Erin Benay (Distinguished Scholar in the Public Humanities & Director of Undergraduate Studies, Case Western Reserve University) will discuss collaborative, community-partnered undergraduate course, The City as Museum: Monuments and Memory, which explored the history of public monuments from antiquity to the present-day with an aim toward actively contributing to the civic life of the community. Students joined with partner, LAND Studio, an urban planning and public arts nonprofit, to develop and contribute to The City is Our Museum app (TCIOM). Created in 2021, TCIOM hosts walking tours of Cleveland’s most integral public art. Carefully curated and thoughtfully written, TCIOM now has over 2900 users. CWRU Students partnered with LAND Studio to diversify the types of voices that come together to interpret Cleveland’s monuments and to present its collective memories. This project introduced students to the theory and methods of the public humanities, but it also successfully served the larger university and urban community by bringing research into practice.

Dr. Lauren Turek (Associate Professor of History & Director of Museum Studies, Trinity University) will highlight a collaborative digital history exhibit project she assigns in which upper-division undergraduate students work with materials selected by the University Special Collections Library and Archives to develop an Omeka (online, digital) exhibit that draws upon public history coursework while meeting current library needs. Turek will discuss the assignment structure, grading rubric, and outcomes, including lessons learned from multiple iterations of the course. She will share how the project helps students develop skills in secondary and primary archival research, material culture analysis, as well as in digital exhibit design (including visual design and accessibility considerations, web-building techniques, metadata and cataloging basics, techniques for writing object labels and exhibit texts, and how to incorporate interactive elements such as timelines and maps), and how she has integrated oral and visual presentation components to the assignment.

Dr. David Trowbridge (William T. Kemper Associate Research Professor of Digital and Public Humanities,  University of Missouri-Kansas City) is the author of A History of the United States, a textbook published under a Creative Commons license and available to students and the public in various formats. As part of his research and teaching, Trowbridge uses technology to connect people to history. In 2013, Trowbridge began work on Clio, a website and mobile application that connects people to nearby history and culture, as a professor at Marshall University. Clio is free for everyone and has grown to over 38,000 articles for individual landmarks and over seventeen hundred walking tours and virtual tours of museums and historic sites.

Erin Bell, MLIS, is an information science professional with 7+ years of service in the field. She is the Operations Director at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, after many years of volunteering. Erin is dedicated to accessible library service and passionate about archival preservation. She is a co-creator of the Gerber/Hart’s podcast Unboxing Queer History, and in 2024, Erin and Gerber/Hart partnered with HumanitiesX to deliver an original course ("DO SAY GAY: Banned Books and LGBTQ+ Freedoms") in which DePaul University students worked with the library to develop a new exhibition in the Gerber/Hart space. In this presentation, Bell will share insights from her work in the library and archives, including Gerber/Hart's practice of co-curating public events and exhibits with students, community members, scholars, artists, and more.

After our speakers’ presentations, workshop attendees will have time to explore ideas with others in one of two breakout rooms: one focused on courses, assignments, and projects related to digital or physical exhibits, and another focused on curating tours. In these breakout sessions, attendees will first have a chance to discuss their ideas with presenters and other attendees.

Workshop Prompt 

Brainstorm an existing course, assignment, program, or collaborative project that might be revised to engage students/publics in creating an exhibit or tour. Take notes on the following questions:

• What course, assignment, or collaborative project would you revise?
• What might be the subject-matter focus of the exhibit or tour?
• What public audience(s) can you imagine for this exhibit or tour?
• What new or existing outcomes could the exhibit or tour help your course, assignment, or collaborative project to achieve? (Note that you might consider Fisher’s 5 goals for the publicly-engaged humanities: 1) informing contemporary debates; 2) amplifying community voices and histories; 3) helping individuals and communities navigate difficult experiences; 4) expanding educational access; and 5) preserving culture in times of crisis and change.)
• What challenges do you anticipate?
• What questions do you have about how to get started?