Public Work was a podcast based out of Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. The project and episode planning began in the Fall of 2017, and a twelve-episode season was released in 2018.
Public Work is a place where we hope to share interesting people, projects, and questions that are currently shaping the worlds of public humanities. We’re interested in education, research, and public engagement initiatives that connect individuals and communities to art, history, and culture. Each episode features an interview where a member of the Center for Public Humanities community at Brown talks with someone doing exciting work in the field.
Why a podcast? We’re interested in stretching the borders/medium of public humanities. We know not everyone has the time to sit down and read an interview, or an article, or a review. We hope this form engages a variety of publics.
We released a new episode every other Wednesday. During its original run, you could find us on iTunes and on SoundCloud. Because SoundCloud requires a paid plan beyond a particular number of hours, we moved the podcast episodes over to Anchor in early 2019. You can find and download episodes on our Anchor page. Jim has also updated individual episode pages here with Anchor embeds, so you can still play content on the project site. We’ve also backed up every episode of Public Work in Brown University’s Digital Repository for long-term preservation. And episodes 3-12 can be heard (as of May 2019) on Spotify, if that’s your preferred podcasting platform!
Questions or comments? Get in touch on Twitter (@PublicWorkPod) or send us an email: [email protected] Note: Our Twitter page is pretty quiet as of 2019, but you can still use the email address, or email Jim: [email protected]
The Center for Public Humanities and its community of students, faculty, and community collaborators are still very much interested in podcasts: we just decided to sunset this particular project once Amelia graduated in the Spring of 2018. We had a good run! In the Spring of 2019, Jim focused part of his graduate-level course in Digital Storytelling on Audio Storytelling: you can check out the syllabus here. You may also be interested in Now Here This, an exciting student-run audio storytelling collective here at Brown.
Public Work Team (2017-18)
Amelia Golcheski (Co-Creator and Co-Producer) is currently a second-year master’s student in Brown’s Public Humanities program. She’s interested in southern history, memory, digital humanities, cultural heritage, the Oxford comma, Dolly Parton, college basketball, and a whole lot of things in between. You can find her on Twitter @am_golcheski.
Jim McGrath (Co-Creator and Co-Producer) is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities at Brown’s Center for Public Humanities. He’s interested in digital humanities, digital archives, public history, seltzer, professional wrestling, and lots of other stuff. You can find him on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.
Obligatory disclaimer language to keep us out of trouble: The views expressed on this podcast do not necessarily reflect the views of Brown University, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, or any institutions and organizations affiliated with our interviewers and interview subjects.
Special thanks to Patrick Rashleigh at the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship for getting us ready for podcasting. Some podcast content is recorded with resources at Brown’s Sidney E. Frank Digital Studio.