ACLS Presents Hashtag Humanities: Scholars, Social Media, and Knowledge for the Public Good

The American Council of Learned Societies presents “Hashtag Humanities: Scholars, Social Media, and Knowledge for the Public Good,” a virtual discussion panel, on Thursday, October 1, 2026, 2-3 PM ET.

As social media continues to play a critical role in how many people receive news and information—in some cases being their primary source—it has become increasingly important for scholars to have a significant voice on popular platforms.

Rigorous training in research and analysis gives today’s PhDs in humanistic fields an advantage in the ongoing battle for revealing truth and fact in a crowded multimedia landscape.

Join us as we hear from three popular scholarly influencers on why and how they’ve built their social media followings and how they hope to change how people access knowledge beyond the academy.

Meet Our Panel

Dr. Xavier Buck is a public historian, nonprofit executive, and the founding director of the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland, California. As Executive Director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, he leads one of the nation’s foremost efforts to preserve, interpret, and expand the legacy of the Black Panther Party. His portfolio includes museum development, national exhibitions, curriculum design, public programming, technology-driven archives, and large-scale anniversary initiatives. In 2021, Dr. Buck was named an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow and appointed to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund for the project “Center for Social Justice at Thurgood Marshall College Fund.” A graduate of St. John’s University and the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Buck bridges scholarly rigor with cultural strategy. He is also the creator of @historyin3, a fast-growing digital platform with hundreds of thousands of followers, where he distills Black history, politics, and global liberation movements into sharp, three-minute narratives that reach millions each month. Across museums, media, and grassroots campaigns, Dr. Buck’s work centers authentic storytelling, community empowerment, and historical clarity. Whether curating exhibitions, producing national tours, advising cultural institutions, or crafting viral educational content, he is committed to ensuring that Black history is preserved, accessible, and understood as a blueprint for building a more just future.

Heather Colley published her debut novel The Gilded Butterfly Effect (Three Rooms Press) in October 2025. It was described by Forbes as a “sharply written trip into dark academia.” Heather is a PhD student in English Literature at Oxford University. She holds a master’s degree in literature from St. Andrews University and a bachelor’s degree in the same subject from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. She creates literary content for an audience of over 150,000 across Instagram and TikTok (@heathercolleyauthor) and Substack, where her newsletter is a Bestseller (@demystifyingliterature).

Dr. Dan McClellan is a public scholar of the Bible and religion. He received his PhD in theology and religion from the University of Exeter, where he wrote his dissertation on the conceptualization of deity and divine images in the Hebrew Bible through the methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion. He goes by @maklelan on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, where he works to increase public access to scholarship about the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. In addition to his open-access monograph, YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach, Dan is the author of the New York Times bestselling trade book, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About the Bible’s Most Controversial Issues (Macmillan Publishers).

Meet Our Moderator

Dr. Keyanah Nurse is a Senior Program Officer for Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) Programs at ACLS, where she leads both the Digital Justice Grants Program and the Intention Foundry. Before joining the ACLS staff in September 2021, she served as an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There, she contributed to a variety of doctoral career diversity initiatives, as well as received training in digital humanities for her research on the history of the global Black press. As a historian of the African Diaspora with a specialization in modern Latin America, her research interests include liberalism, state formation, race, gender and sexuality, and black intellectual traditions. She received her PhD in History from NYU in May 2020 and her BA in Hispanic Studies from Columbia University in 2014.