Convening the symposium “The Humanities in the Public Sphere” and then making from it the present book demanded much effort from several people. Our thanks go first to the participants, who responded to the call to contribute short position papers and pointed responses with fresh and pertinent thinking. Thanks next go to the audience, which engaged speakers and respondents in debate that was usually sharp, helpful, and worth recording. The symposium owed much to the support of Kim Lane Scheppele, Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton, and to Leslie Gerwin, Judi Rivkin, and Jennifer Bolton. It was also supported by Charles Beitz, Director of the University Center for Human Values, with help from Erum Syed, Susan Winters, and Kimberly Girman, and backed by Leonard Barkan, Chair of Comparative Literature, and Cheryl Cantore, manager of that department. Many last-minute arrangements were graciously handled by Dora Zhang.
We are grateful also to Helen Tartar, editorial director of Fordham University Press, for her quick and enthusiastic endorsement of our book, and unflagging encouragement in seeing it through to publication. We are also grateful to assistant editor Thomas Lay.
Reaching further back, neither symposium nor book would have been possible without the very generous award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that, in 2008, gave birth to the series of seminars known as “The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism,” which from the start envisioned this symposium as their point of arrival (though they in fact continue to this day). Special thanks are due to Harriet Zuckerman and Joseph Meisel, the pillars of the humanities at the foundation.
While the conception of seminars, symposium, and book was the work of Peter Brooks, Hilary Jewett was coordinator throughout and performed the editorial work on this volume.