Where Are All the Humanities Communication Trainings? — Cataloging Courses and Programs in Humanities Communication

In May 2022, I began working as an Assistant Director of Research Communication with the PhD Plus program at the University of Virginia. PhD Plus was a relatively new initiative to support graduate student professional development—to help them understand the relevance of their skills for a range of careers and to build skills that their training doesn’t otherwise provide. Two of us were hired at the time with the same role, meaning half the PhD Plus team was dedicated to communication skills—not only is that category of skill so wide and varied (we train students in writing and presenting for all audiences, engaging with policy, fellowship and grant writing, preparing cover letters and CVs, interviewing, storytelling, etc.), versatile communication skills were also rightly recognized by our leadership as crucial for scholars whether they stay in academia or enter the public realm (to the extent such distinctions exist).

One of my first missions was to design communication training specifically for humanities students. Just as the Center for Humanities Communication (CHC) is doing, I began by cataloging the:

1. scholars at my university writing for the public, 
2. goals and needs of my target audience – in this case, PhD students in the humanities, 
3. resources available to me, and 
4. programs that other institutions were hosting.

I found many humanities faculty members at my institution writing or talking about their work for popular audiences, but little formal training in that kind of communication. Graduate students generally perceived the value of raising their own public profiles and reaching a wider audience, but often lacked direction in how to even start approaching those goals. Like many resources for trainees, access and expectations aren’t evenly distributed, and much is dependent on who your mentors are.

When I heard about the aims of the CHC, I jumped at the chance to continue this benchmarking work to get a fuller picture of the humanities communication landscape. At the beginning of the summer, I began searching for humanities communication resources and programming across the United States using Google and my knowledge of where this training could potentially exist. Once we identified about 30 trainings, patterns started emerging, and we were able to start sorting them into a flexible taxonomy of training areas that would shift as new patterns arose. Below is a summary of what we’ve found so far and recommendations for next steps.

Training insights to help build the field of Humanities Communication

Search Method: It’s perhaps not surprising that typing “humanities communication” into a search engine fails to turn up the volume of relevant results that “science communication” does.

What I found, to make a long journey brief, is that the types of training we’re looking for are often found by specifying communication modality (op-ed writing and podcasting being the most common) or field (history communication). A more fruitful search method has been looking where this training is likely to occur—I sought the websites of humanities centers and institutes, professional organizations, and public humanities training programs. This has turned up about 30 existing or past training programs so far, and the insights from what we’ve found will help us refine our search methods to keep digging. (See the in-progress spreadsheet on which I have collected my findings to date.)

Content: The training programs that we’ve collected so far tend to align with certain overlapping goals: awareness/education, advocacy (led by organizations like the NHA), and public engagement (Public Humanities). The topics of these programs are typically communication products (op-eds, podcasts, etc) and rhetorical skills (engaging the audience, storytelling, etc). Where science communication often focuses or starts with the fundamentals of how to talk about science with non-specialists, humanities communication training tends to focus on mastering the medium.

Hosts, Audience, and Accessibility: Programs hosted by universities are typically open only to faculty and students, while those hosted by professional organizations are open only to their membership (with the exception of some publicly available recordings of panel discussion events). Those trainings that are open more widely are typically hosted by private organizations and non-profits that charge a fee to participants (like the Op-Ed Project or StoryCenter). Of what we’ve found so far, the only free widely-accessible trainings are asynchronous workshop/panel recordings and collections of written resources (blog posts, guides, etc).

Structure: A taxonomy is also emerging in training modality: we’ve found live in-person and virtual tutorials, asynchronous resources, panel discussions, online courses, and in-person courses. While there were a fair number of science communication fellowships, fellowships in the humanities tended toward Public Humanities more broadly, with a communication training component (see NYU’s Public Humanities Fellowship and UC Santa Barbara’s Public Humanities Graduate Fellows Program). 

Our experience at the University of Virginia might be representative of the mixed approach others take to levels of programming—some students may have the interest and time for an in-depth multi-day workshop on Op-Ed writing, but others may need more information first on how this kind of writing fits into an academic career, where this writing takes place, what the benefits are, etc. Panel discussions, for example, are low-hanging fruit (quick to organize, free, and easy to attend) and a marketing and networking tool to get people interested in more in-depth training. The more intense the training, the smaller the audience and the more expensive it is for us to run. 

A future step might be digging further into how existing programs approach audience cultivation. But in the meantime, our goal is to expand this list of existing trainings by engaging our growing network of humanities communicators.

Reach out to Kelly Oman at to let the CHC know about other humanities communication training programs