Sharing the Dream with New Audiences via New Media

Abstract

Much of my career has been ordinary (with a fairly conventional menu of teaching, research, and administration) but in the last decade or so, it has become rather less ordinary. I constructed a website in conjunction with an opera based on Dream of the Red Chamber, and I began writing scripts and performing them with an early music group called Sacabuche. While I do not regard either project as “public history,” both are public, and both have deep roots in my work as a historian. Both projects have brought me tremendous pleasure. Projects like these (and those described elsewhere in this issue) matter in that they make our work as historians or literary scholars visible to a larger public. This will not of course eliminate the crisis of the humanities, but projects explicitly addressed to public audiences are one way of approaching the problem. I was a full professor long before I embarked on these public and artistic endeavors. If we are serious about encouraging young scholars to experiment with unconventional projects, we need to figure out ways of evaluating and acknowledging them in our hiring and promotion and tenure processes. I have written elsewhere about my work with Sacabuche;1 here I describe my work with the opera. The Dream of the Red Chamber has invited commentary, illustration and adaptation since its first publication in the late eighteenth century. In the fall of 2016, the San Francisco Opera performed a work which participated in this ongoing response to the novel—in an Englishlanguage opera, with the libretto written by David Henry Hwang and