Event: The Art and Industry of Public Intellectual Practice

Over the past few decades, scholars have increasingly written for audiences outside the academy, producing not only articles, but public commentaries, essays and other creative works. What is involved in navigating these different writing forms and the wider publishing industry? And how have these new practices changed the role of the public intellectual? Public intellectual practice is driven partly by accessibility — by research or expertise that has ‘real world impact’ and is inflected by the corporate idea of ‘communication’. But are these the only things we should be striving for? What does, and can, public intellectual work do?

Join us for a special panel bringing together scholars, creative writers and publishers from the USA and Australia to discuss the challenges and affordances of public intellectual practice.

Presented in partnership with Macquarie University and State Library of New South Wales.

Katie Barclay is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in History at Macquarie University. She writes widely on the history of emotions, gender and family life. She has authored and edited more than 20 books and collections. Recent works include the forthcoming Loneliness in World History, Caritas: Neighbourly love and the early modern self (2021) and A Cultural History of Love, 6 vols (ed., 2024). She is currently working on a project on ‘how to feel safe at the end of the world’.

Christian Gelder is a Macquarie University Research Fellow. His current research focuses on American literature and the development of psychiatry in the twentieth century. He completed his PhD in English at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, in 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, The Cambridge Quarterly, Australian Humanities Review, Psychoanalysis and History, S: Journal for the circle of Lacanian ideology critique and elsewhere. With Robert Boncardo, he is the author of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (2017).

James Jiang is editor of Sydney Review of Books. A critic and a scholar, he has worked as assistant editor at Griffith Review and Australian Book Review. Prior to becoming an editor, he taught in the English and Theatre Studies program at the University of Melbourne. He holds a PhD in modernist literature from the University of Cambridge and has written reviews and essays for a variety of publications in Australia (Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, Cordite, LIMINAL Magazine) and abroad (Cambridge Quarterly, Ploughshares, Modernism/modernity). His interests range across poetry (contemporary and historical), the history and theory of criticism, diasporic writing, translation and sport.

Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and home in nineteenth-century Paris and London (1999), Between Women: Marriage, desire, and friendship in Victorian England (2007) and The Drama of Celebrity (2019). In 2012 Sharon co-founded Public Books, an online magazine dedicated to bringing cutting-edge scholarly ideas to a curious public. Her own public writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Pacific Standard, The Boston Globe, Vox, the Chronicle Review and The Guardian.

Kate Rossmanith is an ARC Future Fellow and an Associate Professor at Macquarie University. She writes on emotion concepts in the justice system, and on forms of nonfiction writing. She is the author of Small Wrongs (2018) and co-editor of Remorse and Criminal Justice: Multi-disciplinary perspectives (2022). Her essays have appeared in Public Books, Sydney Review of Books, The Monthly, Guardian Australia, Inside Story and Best Australian Essays 2007. Her essay ‘Ditching the New Yorker Voice’ (2022) was featured on Lit Hub Daily. She will be a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford in 2025.