I Know It When I See It: The Invisible, Flourishing Humanities in Virginia with Dr. Matthew Gibson

Dr. Gibson's talk is entitled "I Know It When I See It: The Invisible, Flourishing (Public) Humanities in Virginia." This talk and discussion will focus on both the definitional and real challenges we see across humanities fields in higher education. The talk posits that we can mitigate some of these challenges by paying more attention to what is happening in our public communities across the Commonwealth, and readjusting higher education frameworks toward collaboration with the public. The conversation will highlight some of the activities we’ve seen at Virginia Humanities from the public and invite a larger conversation about how public humanities projects might be more integrated into VCU classroom settings and research.
Matthew Gibson is Executive Director of Virginia Humanities, where he created and helped endow Encyclopedia Virginia, a free and reliable multimedia resource that tells the inclusive story of Virginia for students, teachers, and communities who seek to understand how the past informs the present and the future. He received his PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 2005. His dissertation focused on the production of White vigilante narratives in popular American fiction from the novels of Thomas Dixon to the 2004 creation of the Minuteman Project along the Southwest border of the United States.