When our director, Stephanie Harrell, first encouraged us interns at the Institute to apply to the National Humanities Leadership Council, I saw it as an exciting opportunity. As a Public Humanities Intern, I had already been thinking deeply about how the humanities shape the way we understand people and the world around us.
Being selected for the National Humanities Leadership Council has been both exciting and affirming. The program, established by the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, seeks to bring together undergraduate students from a wide range of institutions for discussions, workshops, and collaborative projects that center on humanities-based leadership. What I have appreciated most is how the Council treats the humanities as a way of thinking that matters in everyday life. From our very first meeting, we have been asked to consider how our humanistic perspectives help us to lead more thoughtfully and to respond more carefully to the challenges of the present.
Throughout the year, the Council has given me the opportunity to participate in conversations with humanities scholars and leaders working across different fields. For example, we heard from Dr. Maysan Haydar, whose work focuses on immigration, military history, and Islamic and Middle Eastern history, and from Dr. Elizabeth Shand, a digital collections librarian whose work centers on digital humanities, archives, and print culture. Hearing from speakers with such different areas of expertise has reinforced for me how wide-ranging the humanities can be.
My favorite and most rewarding part of the program has been being placed in a smaller working group with students whose interests overlap with my own. These groups were organized around broad humanities questions, with some focused on personal stories and history, digital technologies and research, cultural texts and the arts, or creative media and human experience. My own group focused on how to center community voices in the stories told about them, which felt especially meaningful to me. Working in that group gave us the chance to collaborate more closely and begin shaping projects and proposals that we genuinely cared about, especially around public-facing academic work. The feedback we received on our proposals encouraged us to think more seriously about how our ideas might reach people beyond our universities through meaningful dialogue. That part of the experience mattered to me most because it pushed me to think more carefully about how humanities work can move beyond the classroom and have a real presence in the communities we are part of.
Overall, the National Humanities Leadership Council has strengthened my belief that the humanities are absolutely essential to leadership. I am so very grateful to have been selected for this opportunity and to the National Humanities Center for creating a program that invests so intentionally in undergraduate students.
