Courses

This class is for graduate students interested in practicing public scholarship as future academics,  journalists, editors, curators, podcasters, and cultural programmers. Readings will introduce students to writing past and present that aims to make academic ideas available to a broad readership and engages in spirited evaluation of other people’s ideas. Class discussions will teach students how to pitch, write, and publish long-form reviews that make rigorous scholarship engaging and accessible to an educated general public.

Writing assignments, weekly workshops (“crits”), and a final project will allow students to develop, pitch, and complete a potentially publishable long-form review. Genres to be analyzed include the profile, the personal essay, the critique, and, of course, the review. The readings span both the humanities and social sciences and include digital economies; urbanism and environmentalism; museum design, art exhibits and visual archives; contemporary film and television; and technologies of the self. Models and resources will include The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Public Books, a Columbia-based digital magazine of ideas, art, and scholarship that currently draws around 800,000 readers a year.