Over the last decade, scholarly attention has turned to the humanities’ collective past with renewed energy and sense of purpose. As a result, a new field of research, the history of the humanities, has crystalized and received broad international attention. In this forum, we take a special interest in the question of where the history of the humanities is heading. And where do we want it to go? In order to fuel discussion, six scholars have been invited to contribute their perspectives on what the future holds for the field. In our introduction, we frame these contributions by outlining the origins, current state, and potential trajectories of the new (or possibly reformed) field of research. Summarizing the ambitions of the field as well as its transdisciplinary links and influences, we reflect on why it has emerged as well as consider the larger implications for the humanities as a whole. It is argued that although the full potential of the history of the humanities is far from being reached, the very concept has functioned as an integrative platform, opening up new lines of inquiry within a larger framework. Nevertheless, as the contributions to this forum collectively make evident, there are also a number of challenges that the history of the humanities will face going forward.

While the history of the humanities is rapidly expanding as a new field of study, questions about diversity and inclusiveness of the field have rarely been addressed. An examination of the papers presented at the Making of the Humanities conferences and the articles published in the History of Humanities journal shows that the field is far from diverse. In this essay, I argue that pursuing greater diversity is fruitful for the field because it helps to avoid gaps and biases, uncovers interactions and influences across regions, debunks myths in the history of the humanities, and allows for finding global trends that are left unnoticed otherwise. I will offer three suggestions—for researchers, teachers, and the Society for the History of the Humanities—for how we can turn the history of the humanities into a more diverse and inclusive field. While I focus mostly on cultural and geographical diversity, I also address gender diversity at the end of the essay.

What are the humanities? As essentialist answers to this question are losing credibility, historians may help elucidate what the humanities are by offering genealogical accounts of how the ideals, practices, and institutions currently known as the humanities have come into being. This article points out why such a genealogical project is important and how it might serve as a collective aspiration for the emerging field of the history of the humanities. Specifically, the essay describes the project as driven by a commitment to unraveling multilayered legacies and path-dependent trajectories. Instead of offering unifying accounts, genealogists are attentive to diversity, disagreement, and change over time. Consequently, genealogies are well suited to explain why the humanities are made up of sometimes contradictory ideas and practices, while looking differently in Cairo or Buenos Aires than in Paris or New York.

What can the history of the humanities learn from the history of science? Quite a lot. We could certainly include a much more developed inspection of humanistic practices and of the many, often previously unacknowledged, people who contributed to them. But the history of science cannot deliver for us a set of parameters that define our subject clearly, and perhaps we ought not to go too deeply into the history of practices, or combine this with the recognition that we have our own similar traditions to revive. Finally, the sciences and humanities are today in quite different positions with respect to the need to deconstruct legitimizing discourses. If historians of science need to constantly remind the public that geniuses often have feet of clay, the history of the humanities has, at least at present, a different burden: to show that many persons in the past have striven to understand the human condition, often in ways we now find objectionable, but sometimes in ways that inspired, illuminated, educated, and liberated the minds of readers, contemporary and future.

Today scholars “write” and students “read” with media that goes beyond paper. This essay analyzes the developments that make it possible: the recuperated speaker, the internet, digitization, and intensifying visualization. It then surveys the new forms of productions in the humanities that these developments give rise to. What will tomorrow’s historian of the humanities do with these new productions? This is answered in the last section of this article.

Advocates for the humanities have ongoing need of good work in the history of humanities as they canvas evidence of how the field has, in the past, sought to describe its contributions to knowledge and articulate the importance of its distinctive concentration on the objects, media, and value of culture. Apprehending better which arguments have been persuasive contextually and which have fared less well can help sharpen defenses for the future and avoid errors of description. This forum contribution considers the need to take a wide view of which disciplinary histories will be relevant—reinforcing the introduction’s observation that the history of the humanities continues to develop in close connection with the history of knowledge, construed more generally. In recent years, numerous advocates have advanced claims that humanities disciplines are well equipped (even uniquely equipped) to handle “wicked problems”—intractably complex problems germane to the future flourishing of our societies and the planet. Returning to the origins of the wicked problems concept within late 1960s urban planning, and subsequent disputes within the social sciences over its validity, I argue that deploying it persuasively on behalf of the humanities will require careful attention to a history that has left it with uneven traction in other disciplines.

Recent history has been unusually eventful in the humanities, with harshening political circumstances in some countries but also attempts to carve out new missions and link the humanities to agendas of relevance on environment, climate, energy, digitalization, migration, and other contemporary challenges. In this context, might there be cause to review the history of humanities as informed by the ongoing rethinking of humanities futures? The point of departure of this article is that there are historical humanities that actually were not so much “humanities” at all in their own time. Rather they were integrative parts of domains such as natural history, field exploration, museums, and collections—a differently embedded version of the humanities that are now reappearing as an elemental, geo-anthropological project under concepts such as the Anthropocene. This history is far from unknown, but it has been less visible, concealed by the historicizing of science, and related intellectual and institutional histories, which have de-emphasized their humanities past. This article attempts to make it more visible as a relevant “deep” history of the reconfigurations of humanities that are emerging in the twenty-first century.