The Academy in Crisis and Scholarship in the Public Sphere

Growing out of a roundtable discussion on public scholarship at the Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium in 2013, this piece proposes the field of Modern Greek Studies as a cross-disciplinary forum that, as such, has the potential to engage a broader public even within the university setting, despite often being pigeonholed as an “area studies” field. Moreover, given the recent shift away from tenure-line hiring at American universities, public scholarship is becoming increasingly crucial to the intellectual life of our communities and of individual scholars who may or may not find or keep tenure-track jobs in the academy. It thus behooves us as a field to support the crossover work of academics engaging a broader public with their work, and as individuals to imagine ways of pursuing scholarship outside the institutional framework of the college or the university, while pushing back against the corporatization of the university in every way we can.