What is Public History Now? Exploring engagement, impact, collaboration and coproduction in History Higher Education

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Public History, that is history that is made and/or communicated outside of the academy and the study of this kind of history within the academy, is rapidly becoming an established subdiscipline of history in the UK. However, compared to intellectual and academic projects in places like Australia, Canada and the United States, UK public history has developed relatively late. In the United States, the first public history programme was founded in 1975. By contrast, the first MA in Public History in the UK was not founded until 1996, and almost two decades passed before another one was established. The surge in interest in Public History in United Kingdom Higher Education over the past half decade is remarkable, and underwritten by a rich intellectual tradition (Samuel, 1991) that has begun to translate into an explosion of exciting research projects, programmes and collaborations. Since around 2013, over 15 new Public History MA programmes have been founded, and the majority of UK history undergraduate and graduate programmes offer modules and pathways in public history and heritage. Several new Public History Centres and Institutes have been founded, while other Centres have expanded their remit to explicitly include public history. Thanks to the strong push for 'impact and engagement' and collaboration with external partners from the UKRI (and other) funding bodies, all historians are thinking about 'public history' to an unprecedented degree, and many research projects increasingly take public history as their central focus. Meanwhile, interest in public history outside the academy has never been greater. Thanks in part to the enormous growth in digitized records; more accessible archives, libraries and heritage institutions; and renewed interest in different kinds of popular history books, television, and media, more people are making history in public than ever before, and finding new ways to communicate, disseminate, and connect their history work with others and inside and outside the academy. At the same time, history has never been more controversial, debated, and fought-over as it is in the present day: from falling statues to the national curriculum, from the use of 'history' by state institutions and by the radical right, it is clear that the past is alive-and often enflamed-in the present.It seems therefore a very good time to bring together academic historians who work in the field of public history, teach on public history programmes and run public history centres, in order to examine and develop our ideas, our programmes, and our collaborations with each other, and with non-academic historians widely defined. This research network will consist of a series of agenda-setting, best-practise sharing, and resource-creating workshops, including the creation of a 'hub' website. It will culminate in a major conference bringing together academic public historians and non-academic public historians to examine the state of the field in all its forms, and develop exciting partnerships between higher education and the vibrant, thriving world of non-academic public history.