Humanities researchers need to sell themselves, says US British Council director

Academics in the humanities need to “work harder” to promote the skills of humanities graduates to the wider world, Paul Smith, the British Council’s director in the US, has said.

Writing in The Guardian on 19 March, following an activist humanities conference at the University of Oxford last week, Smith said that there were two issues “gathering global anxiety” in the field.

The first is getting recognition for the fact humanities graduates have unique skills that make them “eminently employable”, and the second is that all global challenges “desperately need the insights of the humanities”.