The Public Value of the Humanities

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Recession is a time for asking fundamental questions about value. At a time when governments are being forced to make swingeing savings in public expenditure, why should they continue to invest public money funding research into ancient Greek tragedy, literary value, philosophical conundrums or the aesthetics of design? Does such research deliver 'value for money' and 'public benefit'? Such questions have become especially pertinent in the UK in recent years, in the context of the drive by government to instrumentalize research across the disciplines and the prominence of discussions about 'economic impact' and 'knowledge transfer'. In this book a group of distinguished humanities researchers, all working in Britain, but publishing research of international importance, reflect on the public value of their discipline, using particular research projects as case-studies. Their essays are passionate, sometimes polemical, often witty and consistently thought-provoking, covering a range of humanities disciplines from theology to architecture and from media studies to anthropology.

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His books include Shakespeare and Ovid (1993); John Clare: A Biography (2003) - winner of the 2004 Hawthornden Prize and the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial prize for biography; The Genius of Shakespeare (1997); and Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2009). He was the editor of the Arden edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1995).

This book provides a top notch tutorial on the current states of humanities research in the UK. * Times Higher Education Supplement (March 24, 2011) * ...a wonderful new edited collection on The Public Value of the Humanities, which presents an informative, thought-provoking and ultimately robust defence of humanities research. The book is essential reading for public, policy-maker, practitioner and academic alike and should contribute to moving discussions beyond the rather cliched assumptions surrounding much contemporary discourse over public funding for humanities research. * LSE Politics Blog *