Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life

Imagining America is a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design. Public scholarship joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence. It includes:

• Scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners;
• Intellectual work that produces a public good;
• Artistic, critical, and historical work that contributes to public debates;
• Efforts to expand the place of public scholarship in higher education itself, including the development of new programs and research on the successes of such efforts.

Public scholarship in the arts and humanities integrates all the missions of higher education: research, teaching, service, and public engagement. Current projects include the Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, the Curriculum Project, and Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE).

"Read Between the Signs" Photo: Amara Geffen

Featured Program

Every two weeks, in this space, we feature a program at a member campus that exemplifies public scholarship in the arts, humanities and design.

Sharpe Community Scholars Program
The Sharpe Community Scholars Program extends William & Mary's tradition of service by offering approximately 75 students the opportunity to connect their academic studies with community activism.

Scholars live in a common residence and enroll in one of a group of specially designated courses that are the basis for year-long service-learning projects. The program's goals for first-year students are to plan and carry out these projects to assist nonprofit and government agencies, with guidance from community leaders, faculty, and undergraduate mentors. www.wm.edu/sharpe/