What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Public Humanities?

With this year’s Being Human Festival (US) set to begin on April 12, we sat down with Dr. Jacqueline Kellish, the NHC’s vice president for public engagement, to discuss the value of public humanities and the story behind bringing the Being Human Festival to the US.

Every year since 2014, communities across the United Kingdom have participated in hundreds of free events as part of the UK’s Being Human Festival. These events, created in partnership between humanities researchers and community and cultural partners, provide exciting and engaging opportunities to celebrate and demonstrate the ways in which the humanities inspire and enrich our everyday lives.

In 2024, the National Humanities Center worked with the founders of Being Human Festival to create a version of the festival for communities in the United States. The inaugural festival included events in eight locations that challenged audiences to consider new ways of understanding the interconnectedness of the human experience.

The 2025 festival, with 19 events in 16 discrete locations across the country, is organized around the theme of “landmarks.” We asked Dr. Jacqueline Kellish to talk with us about the Being Human Festival and how efforts like this help public audiences to understand the work of humanities researchers and better appreciate the role the humanities play in all our lives.

What attracted you to the Being Human initiative in the first place? How do your efforts leading the festival in the United States build on an international legacy?

Kellish: Being Human recognizes that humanities research has given rise to some of our most thought-provoking, wonder-filled, critically transformative perspectives on our shared human experience. Humanities research helps us to make sense of the world around us, to understand legacies of the past, and to imagine a more just future.

Being Human Festival originated in 2014, and serves as the United Kingdom’s national festival of the humanities. The effort has since expanded to include a sister initiative in Australia. The US festival is proud to join our global colleagues in modeling transnational, cooperative public humanities efforts.

Get Involved

Check out the roster of 2025 Being Human Festival events to find the ones closest to you. To get involved in next year’s festival, contact Jacqueline Kellish, vice president for public engagement.

If You Offer It, They Will Attend: NHC’s Growing Educator Community

NHC online webinars provide scholarly content for a growing worldwide community of educators.

Every year since they were launched in 2014, the NHC’s webinar season has grown—an average of 25–30% a year. This growth reflects not only the quality and variety of scholarly content presented, but increasing demand for online professional development among educators at every level.

Now, in their tenth season, the NHC’s education webinars attract hundreds of participants per session. Some of the most popular topics draw audiences of nearly 1,000 educators from Los Angeles, CA to New York City, NY; from New London, North Carolina, to London, England; and as far afield as Chennai, India and Stockholm, Sweden.

Many educators attend multiple webinars, creating a sense of familiarity and congeniality—a community of like-minded education professionals from nearly every US state and a quarter of the world’s countries. The intellectual and professional generosity of this group has become a consistent feature of the NHC’s webinar series, so much so that invited scholars leading individual sessions have remarked on the incredible support the participants offer each other.

This growing community of teachers provides a welcoming experience, answers each other’s questions, and helps each other frame and reframe questions for clarity throughout each webinar. Their feedback to our educational staff notes how extraordinary it is to see such a vibrant and supportive educational community develop and engage each other in real time—feedback and support that continues among the NHC’s online Facebook community, available exclusively for teachers.