Chapter Five -- Historicizing Presentism: From Shakespeare Studies to Public Humanities

What happens when a historicist is confronted with the prospect of presentism? The same thing that happens when a historicist comes face-to-face with anything else: it gets historicized. That’s what I set out to do. I did not expect to come to the conclusion that we need a new academic journal: Public Humanities.

Expanded from my Spring 2019 article in MLA’s Profession, this chapter shows the marriage of historicism and presentism in Shakespeare Studies inspiring a new academic journal, Public Humanities, currently in development. After framing the tension between a historicism trying to be “pure research” and a presentism aiming for “applied research,” the chapter builds to a taxonomy of six varieties of presentism:

  1. Naive presentism: unreflectively using the terms of the present to interpret the past; bad presentism in the discipline of history
  2. Strategic presentism: deliberately using concerns of the present to motivate our study of the past; here the present is a lens for looking at the past, which is the object of study
  3. Analytical presentism: using an interpretation of the past to cultivate an interpretation of the present; here the past is a lens for looking at the present, which is the object of study
  4. Theoretical presentism: using particulars from the past to create abstract schemes and ideas with the potential to elucidate the present and even the future; a more ambitious form of the analytical model
  5. Political presentism: using applied research to draw parallels between the past and present for a call to action in the here and now; ultimately, the mode here is advocacy rather than interpretation
  6. Historical presentism: analyzing presentisms from the past—past uses of the past to interpret the present and the present to interpret the past; this model returns to pure research, but now doing pure research of applied research

Based on these ideas, Public Humanities will be an open access journal dedicated to showcasing scholarship from all areas of the humanities in an accessible, even entertaining, style and to underscoring the value and impact of that research to society at large. Public Humanities aims to expose a broad audience to cutting-edge research, engaging the public in attempts to address the issues facing society today, highlighting the critical role humanities scholarship has to play, and facilitating scholars as they demonstrate the value of their research. Unapologetically high quality and scholarly, the journal will distinguish itself from other publications with a similar mission by being firmly rooted in the academy, accessible but not journalistic, engaging and topical but rigorously peer-reviewed, and freely available to all.