Since 2019, the National Humanities Center and the Digital Scholars Lab at San Diego State have created and hosted four week-long institutes for a total of nearly 300 PhD students and university and college. In response to this ground-level interest in podcasting as public humanities, we developed and led the first University and College Faculty Podcasting Institute in June 2021 with hopes of modeling and extending this interest. The Institute filled to capacity almost immediately, affirming the wide enthusiasm behind this form of scholarship and commentary.

Working in cross-disciplinary and intra-university teams, participants expressed ideas in storyboard form, created and collected audio content, and edited their narrative into an entertaining, powerful podcast. In this panel, historians will question the value and challenges of public-facing scholarship with a focus on emergent thinking strategies, mentorship, interdisciplinary scholarship, and the essential health of the humanities to a liberal and democratic education. More than a review and summary of a program, this panel will dive deeply into the insights and perspectives that trained humanists experienced at key moments in the process. Panelists will represent a variety of institutions from across the country.

Finally, we will provide clear examples of final podcasts in the framework of a co-creating best practices guide. Faculty participants will frame short samples of their final podcasts to identify goals and benchmarks for this type of recognized scholarship.