News about the PHI: "Entertainment Value" Conference May 3-4, 2002, McCune Room (6020 HSSB), UCSB (admission free to public; directions) A unique conference that brings together scholars, artists, critics, designers, screenwriters, producers, architects, programmers, and business leaders to share their view of contemporary entertainment and its future. Presented by the UC Santa Barbara Public Humanities Initiative and organized by a group of scholars from several humanities departments, "Entertainment Value" includes panels on leisure and violence, gaming culture, entertainment and built environments, and the way certain audience-groups intervene in, alter, or "hack" mass entertainment. There are also two special events designed to allow for extended conversation with leading figures in public entertainment or architecture. The intended audience of the conference is not only the academic community but members of industry, the Santa Barbara community,and general public. Admission is free. Sponsors include the UCSB Center for Information Technology and Society, the UCSB College of Letters & Science, Sun Microsystems, Inc., the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the UCSB Digital Media Lecture Series (Media Arts & Technology Program), and the following UCSB departments: Art History; Communications; Comparative Literature; English; and Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies. PHI co-director L. O. Aranye Fradenburg has written an essay that sets out the full idea of "entertainment value" and situates it within the broader horizon of a "public humanities" (full text of essay). See the conference web site for a conceptual statement, schedule, information on speakers and organizers, and directions. Prof. Fradenburg's Summer Term 2001 course on "Practical Criticism" introduces students to "perceptions of language and the arts and humanities current in popular U.S. culture." Aranye Fradenburg, who co-directs the PHI, is teaching her undergraduate course this summer in a way that brings the concerns of the PHI into the curriculum. As she says in her course description, students "leave the course with a greater awareness of the connections between the work they do as humanities majors and the work performed by the arts and humanities in other national domains." (syllabus) Past Events Future Events

The chief concern of the Public Humanities Initiative (PHI) is to explore and influence the highly diverse roles played by the humanities in contemporary culture. If the humanities were ever locked up in the proverbial ivory tower, they are no more. The "culture wars" of recent decades alone indicate how strongly Americans from all walks of life feel about their cultural inheritance and its future.

Moreover, these passions can't be fitted into neat categories of race, region, gender, "street" or "mainstream," "high" or "low" cultures. No one writes more movingly about Homer than Toni Morrison; Vanessa Mae's breathtaking video of Scottish airs is one of the most popular classical recordings of all time. Academic knowledge can be found in the most unexpected places; when Barbie and Ken are garbed as "King Arthur and Queen Guinevere of Camelot," their costumes are as meticulously researched as any period drama on film. Shakespeare is more popular than ever; academics study hip-hop; corporate culture uses the findings of organizational psychologists and sociologists to develop management strategies.

The borders that divide academic from popular culture, sciences from humanities, policy-making and the needs of the classroom, are crossed all the time, every day in every way. Yet contemporary U.S. culture—and funding agencies of all sorts!—often seem to feel otherwise. Why is the fruitfulness of humanities research and teaching for our national creativity such a well-kept secret? How can we continue to break down unnecessary obstacles between different cultural scenes and practices while respecting their differences? How can we continue to think most richly about the fact that culture is what humans do?—and thereby help into being a future of vigorous experimentation in humanistic activities of all kinds?

Research
When the English Department developed its most recent self-statement, we identified the Public Humanities as one of our three chief arenas of research. Several members of our faculty (Giles Gunn, Paul Hernadi, Alan Liu, Aranye Fradenburg, Christopher Newfield, among others) write on the topic of the humanities. Some of us explore the role of the humanities in contemporary corporate, academic, and popular culture; others explore the ethical role of humanities education; still others study the roles of pleasure, beauty, and representation in the learning process. One of our chief goals is to develop working groups that will foster our research, bringing our varied interests together into new visions of the future of the humanities.

Graduate Education
The PHI also hopes to develop expertise in humanities education as an aspect of our graduate program. Several of our faculty have held important posts in humanities administration (Mark Rose, former Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute; Paul Hernadi, former Director of the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center; David Marshall, current Dean of the Humanities; E. Cook, current Associate Dean of the Humanities; Porter Abbott, Acting Director of the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center). Together with our strong profile in research on the topic of the humanities, this distinctively rich accumulation of experience simply begs to be passed on to our students. We would like our Ph.D.'s to leave the English Department not only with a strong specialization and a broad literary education, but also with an understanding of the history of the humanities and the kinds of policy challenges we face in today's world. We are developing ways to build graduate participation into our mini-conferences, by inviting our students to speak on the panels which typically respond to our lecturers' presentations, and by more informal, social means. In the future, we may also consider finding ways to give course credit for student participation in colloquia.

Undergraduate Education
The English Department also recently had the opportunity to restructure its undergraduate major. One important feature of this restructuring is the idea of the "specialization"; in addition to fulfulling broad requirements for the major, students will now be able to elect a series of courses that focus on particular topics or periods—Technology and Literature, for example, or Creative Writing. These specializations will land us and our students right in the thick of discussions about cultural literacy and diversity, and we hope to expand the role of the English Club (an association of English majors) in considering these topics. Our goal is to foster in our undergraduate program a greater awareness of what an English major might mean in today's world and a sense, however diversely it might be expressed, of a common mission.

Community Outreach
A very important aspect of PIH is bringing the "outside world" into the academy and bringing the academy into the "outside world." This year, we have actively pursued the question of how best to accomplish this goal in our own planning meetings and in our Open Forums. We began last spring with two speakers who have been nationally prominent in directing humanities centers, policy-making, and promoting discussion of the role of the humanities in contemporary culture. This fall we are inviting one speaker who is well-known as a commentator on the "culture wars" of previous decades, and another speaker, one of Dartmouth College's top development officers, who fundraises for nonprofits concerned with fostering the arts and humanities in underprivileged populations.