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The Public Culture Project

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The Public Culture Project, housed in Harvard’s Division of Arts & Humanities, aims to revivify our shared public life by placing existential, moral and even spiritual questions at the center of our public conversations. We want to mine the deep insights...

Public Culture Project News 2025-2026

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Ideas of America: 250 Years of Public Culture

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As we mark the first quarter-millenium anniversary of our perennially young country, Americans are once again asking, with particular urgency: who are we? This is far from the first time that we have faced a moment of disunity, alienation or definitional...

Waiting for Light in the Dark: Art and Spirituality on Hope in Dark Times

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On December 7, Harvard’s Public Culture Project in collaboration with the Presidential Initiative on Interfaith Engagement present Eight Approaches, an eight-piece series of paintings by Cambridge-based artist Joshua Meyer. Layered with thick...

Ian Marcus Corbin

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Ian Marcus Corbin is the Director of Harvard’s Public Culture Project, a philosopher on faculty in Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School, and a Faculty Member at the HMS Center for Bioethics.  He serves as a Senior Fellow at...

Belonging in the Modern World?

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America, we are reliably told, is coming apart. Individuals are drifting off into isolation, or, just as bad, clinging to toxic forms of tribalism that rely on exclusion and enmity towards the other. Why is this happening? What are the deep cultural...

The Public Intellectual in American Life

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America has sometimes been described as a pragmatic, anti-intellectual society. But in fact, from the Puritans to the Founders to the New York intellectuals and the Civil Rights movement, many major movements in American life have drawn language and...

The Future of Humanistic Learning

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Even as academic enrollments in the arts and humanities falter, there is a persistent, and even growing interest in the kinds of texts, artifacts and experiences that the arts and humanities offer. To meet this hunger, new educational initiatives are...

From Academic Freedom to Defending Democracy: Our Task in 2026

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Although universities have conducted their affairs within monarchies and even dictatorships, modern higher education has often flourished by being part of an ecosystem defined by broad freedoms of inquiry and speech. In 2026, these freedoms are...

How is digital technology shaping the human soul?

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Digital technology is transforming how we think, write, and connect. Does it stifle creativity and wonder, or open new paths for meaning, community, and faith? Join speakers Nataliya Kos'myna, Brandon Vaidyanathan, E. Glen Weyl, and Moira Weigel as they...

Dean Sean Kelly's message for the Fall Newsletter 2025

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Dear Friends, We’re entering the moment in the semester when encouragement matters most. At the start, energy and enthusiasm carry us forward like a powerful wave. Now, as the Fall begins in earnest, the current changes: midterms arrive, the weather cools...

Religion in the American Story

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All around us are signs of anomie, loneliness and pessimism, driven by economic, technological, cultural and political realities. America went through a similar period of upheaval and discontentment in the early 19th century, and that period gave rise to...