Department of English

• Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Grad lounge (FBH 330)

Join us for a brownbag lunch with Matt Seybold (Elmira College). We will discuss the public humanities and learn about Prof. Seybold's experience producing the podcastThe American Vandal. Seybold launched during the pandemic in 2020. The podcast features discussions of topics related to Mark Twain, US history, literary theory, and media studies. With thousands of regular listeners, it features guests from a wide range of scholarly backgrounds, and gently argues for Twain’s ongoing relevance to a broad array of fields and disciplines. No reading or preparation of any kind is necessary to attend the brownbag lunch. However, Prof. Seybold has created a small curated page of public scholarship (and/or about public humanities) at MattSeybold.com/UPenn.  Below find a note from Prof. Seybold:  This will be an informal conversation during which I'm happy to talk about everything from building websites to recording podcasts to pitching para-academic essays to editing digital editions of primary sources. What I will say, in advance, is that while you may have heard the antonyms to public in public scholarship or public-facing criticism are private, peer-reviewed, unpopular, or specialized, for me the only antonym to public that matters is paywall. Public criticism is not trading the subscribers to Critical Inquiry for the subscribers to the New Yorker; it’s circumventing the subscription model altogether.