Jane Austen, by Cassandra Austen, pencil and watercolor, circa 1810, NPG 3630. Displayed by permission of National Portrait Gallery.

Jane Austen is a distinct cultural figure that serves as a valuable cultural resource for communicating impactful lessons of the humanities to a public audience. Many parents, students, and others now doubt the merits of humanistic study, and numerous politicians point to such fields of inquiry as hazards to communal morality, impediments to personal financial security, or even dangers to national safety. Austen, however, provides a safe, unthreatening, and effective mechanism for public discussions of the work and efficacy of the humanities for four reasons: (1) she enjoys vast popularity, (2) her popularity is both diverse and malleable, (3) her popularity endures within elite spaces of academia while it continues to extend into new public, commercial, and political arenas, and (4) her popularity is global, matching the global crises in the humanities and the global issues addressed by and through the humanities. The seemingly endless on-campus discussions about the precarious condition of the humanities have failed, become ineffective and tired, and, for many, caused great frustration. I attribute a significant part of this failure to the inability of humanities scholars to explain clearly the value of our work to people outside our fields, including parents, students, and other members of the public, many of whom work with basic (sometimes damaging) ideas about humanistic disciplines; in addition, politicians have exacerbated this problem by adding extremist rhetoric to public discourse on humanistic education and research. To address what is now at least sixty-year-old “crisis” in the humanities, we must change both our tactics and our venue. I offer a new strategy based in the ideas of Jane Austen that directly engages the public.

Over the next few years, I will be conducting research and speaking with a diverse range of writers, scholars, artists, and activists around the world to learn more about the importance of Austen to the future of the humanities. These conversations will inform four distinct public-facing projects. I begin with the podcast because it offers an effective means of reaching public audiences often preoccupied with multiple activities and responsibilities; over the next 4-5 years, I will continue to draw on my research to generate a public-facing monograph, a documentary film designed for YouTube distribution, and an edited collection highlighting innovative work on/with Austen informed by the digital humanities, public humanities, and community-based humanistic scholarship.