In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Jeffrey Lawrence, professor of 20th and 21st century American and Latin American literature at Rutgers University and author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño and the Spanish-language novel El Americano. Like me, Jeffrey has found himself intrigued by recent developments on Substack, where a growing literary scene is raising questions, debating issues, and engaging in conversations that don’t fit neatly into traditional academic venues. Our dialogue moves between the institutional structures that shape literary studies, the surprising public appetite for serious engagement with the humanities online, and what it might mean for secondary English education to reconnect with its disciplinary roots.Key Concepts:Public HumanitiesThe distinction between community-engaged public humanities and public-facing writing that still operates through prestige networksWhat it means to invite people into a discourse rather than simply making that discourse more visibleHow Substack has opened space for a literary culture where thousands voluntarily participate in serious criticism outside the credentialing structures of the universityDisciplinary FragmentationThe silos within English departments (literary studies, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, etc.) and how those divisions shape what reaches K-12 classroomsHow methods from rhet-comp and cultural studies seeped into secondary English education while literary studies seemed to turned inwardThe historical decline of cross-pollination between MLA and NCTE, and what that separation has cost both fieldsThe Canon QuestionThe difference between treating the canon as a fixed inheritance and treating it as a living tradition that can be renegotiated in each momentWhy refusing to engage with questions of canonization has its own costs — including leaving students without the tools to participate in, critique, and renew long-standing intellectual communitiesFraming canon formation not as culture wars but as an ongoing disciplinary practice students can and should be invited intoDefending the HumanitiesHow the defense of the humanities can be seen as being too intramural and why that hasn’t workedWhat genuine heterogeneity might look like in literary studies, and why public platforms may offer something the academy currently does notThe gatekeeping mechanisms that constrain academic publishing and hiring, and how they limit the range of voices and methodological commitments in the fieldIn what’s quickly becoming a theme in these conversations, we also discuss how the people best positioned to connect literary culture to a broader public (high school English teachers!) have often been alienated from it through regimes of high stakes testing and curricular standardization. For educators who share that sense that something essential has been lost in the way English is taught and structured since the neoliberal turn within K-16 education, this conversation offers both a diagnosis and a provocation. Jeffrey’s SubstackAnxieties of ExperienceEl AmericanoPodMatchPodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For InterviewsSupport the show