Discovery & Inspiration: Recent Episodes
National Humanities Center
Discovery & Inspiration asks “What can we learn by talking to scholars about their research? What makes them so passionate about the subjects they study? What is it like to make a new discovery? To answer a confounding question?”
For over 40 years the National Humanities Center has been a home away from home for scholars from around the world—historians and philosophers, scholars of literature and music and art and dozens of other fields.
Join us as we sit down with scholars to discuss their work—to better understand the questions that intrigue and perplex them, the passion that drives them, and how their scholarship may change the ways we think about the world around us.
As executive director of Tulsa Educare, Cindy Decker leads one of the nation’s premier early childhood education programs which aims to break the cycle of poverty in Tulsa.
Best-selling author Michael Wallis is a leading chronicler of the American West and its place in the American imaginary—with books on everything from Billy the Kid, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and Wilma Mankiller to the legacy of America’s “Mother Road,” Route 66.
Jeff Stava is Chief Program Officer of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Chief Operating Officer at the Tulsa Community Foundation, and Executive Director of the Gathering Place, Tulsa’s 100-acre, riverfront park which was named USA Today’s top new attraction for 2019, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Places in the World.
As Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Chuck Hoskin Jr. has not only helped improve the economic and physical well-being of his fellow Cherokees, he has also secured the largest language investment in the tribe’s history to expand Cherokee cultural preservation.
Writer and political commentator Jim Hightower has garnered a national following as a radio personality, syndicated columnist, and author speaking to the concerns of everyday Americans in much the same way as Woody Guthrie, the artist and activist who inspires him.
Community activist and entrepreneur Onikah Asamoa-Caesar is the founder and CEO of Fulton Street Books & Coffee, a retail business and gathering place in the heart of Tulsa’s historic Greenwood neighborhood.
Bill Leuchtenburg speaks about presidential history at the National Humanities Center Board of Trustees reception at the Morgan Library, New York, NY on June 8, 2016.
The British writer, reformer, and criminologist George Cecil Ives lived through a transformation in our collective understanding of sexuality. Born in 1867, Ives found early inspiration in the Classical tradition and witnessed the rise of sexology and psychoanalysis before his death in the mid-twentieth century. But Ives did not simply observe these social changes; he chronicled them exhaustively through his published works, correspondence, scrapbooks, and a three-million-word diary. Brian Lewis (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) has analyzed these records to help us to understand how individuals actually experienced these philosophical and social shifts.
In 1996, an exhibition entitled “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists,” was produced for the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s contribution to the Olympic games held in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, Jontyle Theresa Robinson (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is undertaking a multi-tiered initiative to reflect upon and advance the work of that exhibition thirty years later.
Theatrical productions allow playwrights and audiences alike to engage with historical and contemporary social realities. But what are the consequences when particular types of dramatic texts and performances are inadequately disseminated and preserved? Elena Machado Sáez (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is analyzing the ways that Latinx theater in the United States depicts forms of activism and resistance while building shared archives and communities.
In March 1850, five men and two women were photographed in the studio of South Carolina artist Joseph Zealy. When these daguerreotypes were uncovered in 1976, they quickly became some of the best-known pre-Civil War images of enslaved African Americans. Gregg Hecimovich (NHC Fellow, 2015–16; 2022–23) is asking important questions about why these images were captured, how they were lost for so long, and what they might tell us about legacies of white supremacy and enslavement in the United States.
As an art form, opera has proven to be simultaneously entertaining and relatable to diverse audiences, even though it has also been characterized by associations with whiteness and elitism. Naomi André (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is working to tell a more comprehensive and inclusive story of this genre by constructing a history of Blackness in opera from the nineteenth century to the present.
The influence that Nina Simone and Langston Hughes have had on American music, literature, and culture can hardly be overstated. However, the relationship between these two figures has received little to no attention from scholars to date, despite their long history of collaboration. W. Jason Miller (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is conducting research into this partnership in order to inform new understandings about the intersections between art and politics in the Black Arts Movement of the mid-twentieth century.
This lecture illuminates the field of international possibility seen by a leading fraction of young Americans in the 1920s. It offers a counter-narrative to the well-worn account of American “expatriates” who succumbed to the seductions of Paris and soon returned home chastened. A far larger stratum of would-be writers lived outside the United States without desire to be “expatriates,” found vocations in journalism, brought the world home to American audiences, and allowed these international ventures to shape their lives.
When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, it not only revolutionized international trade, but brought about new developments in public health. While diseases like yellow fever and malaria were seen as an inherent threat of “the tropics” by the Americans and French, the process of constructing the canal actually created conditions in which such diseases could proliferate more freely.
In this podcast, Paul S. Sutter (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, discusses the complex interplay of natural and cultural catalysts that can produce and spread disease. Understanding the ways that human activity can bring vectors and viral pathogens together is crucial to reckoning with historical, contemporary, and future public health challenges.
For the past twenty years, Nigerian filmmaking has dominated media production in Africa and among African diasporic communities. One of the most influential figures in this industry is the writer, director, and producer Femi Odugbemi, whose work is an example of the "socially responsible cinema" that has been under-explored in scholarly analyses of Nollywood.
In this podcast, Paul Ushang Ugor (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of English at Illinois State University, considers how Odugbemi’s screen media uses popular cultural forms to encourage public awareness of political and ethical issues in Nigeria and across Africa. By exploring this national film tradition, we can examine both the transformative power of art in a postcolonial context and the global influences that have informed the development and popularization of Nollywood.
Nineteenth-century American paintings frequently depict foreign settings, from the Caribbean to the Arctic. Many of these artworks seem to reveal moments of cultural exchange or scientific inquiry, but they have rarely been seen as evidence of the growing imperialist tendencies of the United States throughout this century.
In this podcast, Maggie Cao (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, considers how the aesthetics and subject matter of nineteenth-century American art can better help us to understand imperialism as a global and historical concept. By examining paintings from this period, we can trace how complex attitudes about cultural relations were represented and disseminated to a wider public.
In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic ideas based on the work of Sigmund Freud were taken up, translated, and even challenged by practitioners from a variety of geographic regions and backgrounds. However, the importance of psychoanalytic thought in China has not always been given adequate attention.
In this podcast, Howard Chiang (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis, discusses how tracking the emergence and adaptation of psychoanalysis in China allows us to understand the effects of cultural and disciplinary exchange on emerging intellectual discourses. By examining China’s influence on psychoanalysis, we can tell a better and more global story about the origins of this field of study.
Widely understood as a destination for leisure and pleasure, the Caribbean has drawn visitors from the global north for over a century. Women have played a central role in establishing this image of the islands, from the proliferation of women's travel writing beginning in the late nineteenth century to their active roles in shaping the tourism and hospitality industry.
In this podcast, Elizabeth S. Manley (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at Xavier University of Louisiana, analyzes the contradictions that have fueled narratives of the Caribbean from the colonial period to the present. By examining the ways that notions of gender, commerce, global mobility, and discourses of exoticism have changed in the region over time, we can better understand how the Caribbean has been culturally constructed as a site for escape and rejuvenation.
In the 1772 court case “Somerset v Stewart,” an English court found that the concept of slavery had no basis in English law. Although this case has long been linked to the eventual abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Britain, the emancipation of enslaved persons was a long and complex process.
In this podcast, Tony Frazier (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at North Carolina Central University, discusses the way that this ruling had broader ramifications in a politically fraught moment. As Frazier explains, the case forces us to reexamine historical assumptions about the end of slavery and the role of institutions in emancipation.
Jane O. Newman (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2015–16), Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
As constructed by Boccaccio, “The Decameron” is a classic collection of fourteenth-century stories, one hundred tales shared by a group of young men and women sheltering in a secluded villa outside Florence to avoid the Great Bubonic Plague. Organized around timeless themes such as the power of fortune and human will, the pain of misbegotten love, the tricks we play on one another, and the importance of virtue, “The Decameron” forms a mosaic that has influenced writers for centuries and created a lasting document about the vibrancy of life juxtaposed against the suffering caused by the Black Death.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YnmZokP3AuA
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-the-decameron/
Joy Connolly (NHC Trustee), President, American Council of Learned Societies
A distinguished classics scholar as well as an accomplished academic administrator, Connolly argues in her most recent book, “The Life of Roman Republicanism” that “Cicero, Sallust, and Horace inspire fresh thinking about central concerns of contemporary political thought and action” including the role conflict plays in the political community, the conditions needed to promote an equal and just society, citizens’ interdependence on one another for senses of selfhood, and the uses and dangers of self-sovereignty and fantasy.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jco7B37Gxyg
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-the-life-of-roman-republicanism/
Cara Robertson (NHC Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2004–05; 2005–06)
When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central enigmatic character has endured for more than one hundred years. Scholar Cara Robertson explores the stories Lizzie Borden’s culture wanted and expected to hear and how those stories influenced the debate inside and outside the courtroom, offering a window into America in the Gilded Age.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iBSkm11B0Vo
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-the-trial-of-lizzie-borden/
Andrew Delbanco (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University; President, The Teagle Foundation
For decades after its founding, the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the “united” states was actually a lie. By awakening northerners to the true nature of slavery, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their human “property,” fugitive slaves forced the nation to confront the truth about itself, and led inexorably to civil war. Andrew Delbanco’s masterful examination of the fugitive slave story illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.
A New York Times Notable Book Selection, 2019; Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize, 2019; Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 2019; A New York Times Critics’ Best Book, 2019
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WAvI1YmZrTA
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-the-war-before-the-war/
Martha S. Jones (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All,” historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more—who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GAkgz7oYPV8
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-vanguard-black-women-broke-barriers-won-vote-equality-for-all/
Mia Bay (NHC Fellow, 2009–10), Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History, University of Pennsylvania
From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, “Traveling Black” explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. It also recounts the many forms of resistance deployed in the prolonged fight for freedom of movement across the United States.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sJW0wRhtMc4?t=113
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fresh-off-the-press-traveling-black/
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (NHC Fellow, 1996–97), Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, National Humanities Medal Recipient
Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. “Sisters and Rebels” follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood.
Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, 2020
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qzURU3xlQ_M
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-sisters-rebels-struggle-for-soul-of-america/
Tsitsi Ella Jaji (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), Associate Professor of English, Duke University
Zimbabwean poet and scholar Tsitsi Ella Jaji discusses and reads selections from “Mother Tongues: Poems,” her award-winning second book of verse, in which she explores our relationships with language, from the first words we learn to the vows we swear, examining how generations of love and loss are inscribed in our every utterance.
Winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, 2018
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VOqFPca5AoI?t=12
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fresh-off-the-press-mother-tongues-poems/
Kim F. Hall (NHC Fellow, 2016–17), Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University
Since her first book, “Things of Darkness,” appeared in 1996, Kim F. Hall’s work has helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare and Renaissance/Early Modern texts. For this talk, she places “Othello: The Moor of Venice” in an Afrodiasporic family story by exploring appearances of Othello and “Shakespeare” in the African Diaspora, specifically at sites of the Black freedom struggle. Hall suggests that we learn much about modern Blackness from how Afrodiasporic peoples evoke, appropriate, and contest “Shakespeare” in their quest to make legible new political Black identities. The talk covers the role of Shakespeare in constructions of Blackness and race; the appropriation of Shakespeare by Black communities; the policing of canonical literature along racial lines; and the race and gender politics of the American stage and popular media.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-o7wtZt4Dqc
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-othello-was-my-grandfather/
Thomas M. Lekan (NHC Fellow, 2009–10; 2010–11; 2022–23), Professor of History, University of South Carolina
Demonstrating the conflicts between international conservation, nature tourism, decolonization, and national sovereignty, “Our Gigantic Zoo” explores the legacy of Bernhard Grzimek, Europe’s greatest wildlife conservationist, who portrayed himself as a second Noah, called on a sacred mission to protect the last vestiges of paradise for all humankind.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eu-NQrLFhLM?t=106
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fresh-off-the-press-our-gigantic-zoo/
Andrew Jewett (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Elizabeth D. Rockwell Visiting Professor of Ethics and Leadership, University of Houston
“Science under Fire” reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States, showing how suspicion of scientific methods and motivation has played a major role in American politics and culture since the 1920s with profound repercussions that continue to affect everyday life in the current moment.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eV6427lvAXM?t=171
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fresh-off-the-press-science-under-fire-challenges-to-scientific-authority-in-modern-america/
David Bromwich (NHC Trustee), Sterling Professor of English, Yale University
Since at least as far back as the expansion of the Vietnam War and the lies and coverups that brought down Richard Nixon, every presidency has further centralized and strengthened executive power, producing the political conditions for our present crisis. In “American Breakdown,” David Bromwich provides an essential analysis of the forces in play beneath the surface of our political system. His portraits of political leaders and overarching narrative bring to life the events and machinations that have led America to a collective breakdown.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8w4KtFCgHZc
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-american-breakdown-the-trump-years-and-how-they-befell-us/
Laura F. Edwards (NHC Fellow, 2007–08), Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Princeton University
Laura F. Edwards’s compelling book considers the sweeping transformation of American law produced in the wake of the Civil War. Through her analysis of constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions, and legal claims espoused by everyone from national politicians to everyday citizens, Edwards demonstrates how the notion of rights became so integral in post-Civil War America, especially in the lives of African Americans, women, and organized laborers.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1AP81lTCJ0U
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-a-legal-history-of-the-civil-war-and-reconstruction/
John McGowan (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), John W. and Anna H. Hanes Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In “Pragmatist Politics,” John McGowan suggests that perhaps the best response to the cynicism and despair that permeate contemporary American politics is a return to pragmatism. Offering an expansive vision of what the United States should be, McGowan combines the thinking of philosophers like John Dewey and William James with the ethos of comedy to imagine what American life could be like if we more fully embraced values such as love, forgiveness, and generosity that are too often left out of our political discourse.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rND1RsZb3sI
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-pragmatist-politics-making-the-case-for-liberal-democracy/
Catherine M. Cole (NHC Fellow, 2006–07), Divisional Dean of the Arts and Professor of Dance and English, University of Washington
“Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice” reveals how the voices and visions of artists in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo can help us see what otherwise evades perception from the injustices produced by apartheid and colonialism. Examining works by contemporary performing artists Brett Bailey, Faustin Linyekula, Gregory Maqoma, Mamela Nyamza, Robyn Orlin, Jay Pather, and Sello Pesa, Cole demonstrates how the arts are “helping to conjure, anticipate, and dream a world that is otherwise.”
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_BlCyoW6rD4
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-performance-and-the-afterlives-of-injustice/
Alexis Pauline Gumbs (NHC Fellow, 2020–21), Independent Scholar, Writer, and Activist
The second book in an experimental triptych, “M Archive ”is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following the worldwide cataclysm we are living through now. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” “M Archive” is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, anti-Blackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JNf8XMg2a7Q
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-m-archive-after-the-end-of-the-world/
Kathleen DuVal (NHC Fellow, 2008–09), Bowman & Gordon Gray Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Now, in “Independence Lost,” she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award, 2015; Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey History Prize, 2016; Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize, 2016
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4fmEZJhe7w8
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-independence-lost/
Joseph Luzzi (NHC Fellow, 2004–05), Professor of Comparative Literature, Bard College
On a cold November morning, Bard College professor Joseph Luzzi found himself racing to the hospital—his wife, Katherine, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident. In an instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father. In the aftermath of unthinkable tragedy, Luzzi relied on the support of his Italian immigrant family to grieve and care for his infant daughter. But it wasn’t until he turned to the Divine Comedy—a poem he had devoted his life to studying and teaching—that he learned how to resurrect his life, passing from his own grief-stricken inferno through the purgatory of healing, and ultimately stepping into the paradise of rediscovered love. “In a Dark Wood” is a beautifully written hybrid of heartrending memoir and a meditation on the power of great art to give us strength in our darkest moments.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JcL4go2pnf0
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/video/virtual-book-club-in-a-dark-wood/
Laura T. Murphy (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery, Sheffield Hallam University
“Freedomville” is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. But Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z4BvpfGfNvQ
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fresh-off-the-press-freedomville-story-of-21st-century-slave-revolt/
Bart D. Ehrman (NHC Fellow, 2009–10; 2018–19), James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In clear and compelling terms, Bart D. Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. As a historian, Ehrman obviously cannot provide a definitive answer to the question of what happens after death, but by helping us reflect on where our ideas of the afterlife come from, he assures us that even if there may be something to hope for when we die, there is certainly nothing to fear.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zGzXbZCHddw
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-heaven-and-hell-a-history-of-the-afterlife/
Annette Gordon-Reed (NHC Trustee), Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Harvard Law School; Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus, University of Virginia
Primarily set at Monticello, where Jefferson not only developed his Enlightenment values but oversaw the workings of a slave plantation, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” looks to shed light on perhaps the most complex of America’s Founding Fathers. Two of the world’s leading scholars of Jefferson’s life and accomplishments, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, join forces to fundamentally challenge much of what we think we know and help create a portrait of Jefferson that reveals some of the mystery at the heart of his character by considering his extraordinary and capacious mind and the ways in which he both embodied and resisted the dynamics of his age.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sTZ2uKmwP0k
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-most-blessed-of-the-patriarchs-thomas-jefferson-and-the-empire-of-the-imagination/
Martin Summers (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Professor of History, Boston College
Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation’s capital, Saint Elizabeths became one of the country’s preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so. “Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions” charts the history of Saint Elizabeths and demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital’s existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. Martin Summers argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a “rights consciousness” in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yF6kTij23vY
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-madness-in-the-city-of-magnificent-intentions/
William D. Cohan (NHC Trustee)
Written by their Andover classmate, journalist William D. Cohan, “Four Friends” tells the stories of Jack Berman, the child of impoverished Holocaust survivors, who used his unlikely Andover pedigree to achieve the American dream, only to be cut down in an unimaginable act of violence; Will Daniel, Harry Truman’s grandson and the son of the managing editor of The New York Times, who does everything possible to escape the burdens of a family legacy he’s ultimately trapped by; Harry Bull, a careful, successful Chicago lawyer and heir to his family’s fortune who took an inexplicable and devastating risk on a beautiful summer day; and John F. Kennedy, Jr., whose story we think we know, told here with surprising new details that cast it in an entirely different light.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gwokOKLPxzI
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/virtual-book-club-four-friends-promising-lives-cut-short/
Joseph Allen Boone (NHC Fellow, 2009–10), Gender Studies Professor in Media and Gender and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, University of Southern California
Taking its inspiration from “Great Expectations,” “Furnace Creek” teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek offers a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.
Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/G2VorSEJWVk
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fresh-off-the-press-furnace-creek-a-novel/
Contemporary audiences may be familiar with the phenomenon of “breaking the fourth wall” in television, film, theater, and other forms of media. In these instances, creators and performers address the audience directly or draw attention to the conventions of a performance in a way that disrupts its immersive or continuous nature.
In this podcast, Mark Evan Bonds (NHC Fellow, 1995–96; 2021–22), professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examines what it means to break the fourth wall in classical music composition and performance. Understanding the way that composers like Franz Joseph Haydn used their compositions to subvert audience expectations can help us to understand the ways that styles of music appreciation have changed from the Enlightenment to the present day.
The emergence of commercial aviation in the early twentieth century redefined global commerce by facilitating the movement of people and goods at previously unimaginable speeds. In Hong Kong, however, this phenomenon was not an inevitable development, and the growth of its aviation industry reflected a complex interplay between political interests, geographical realities, and economic alliances.
In this podcast, John D. Wong(NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of humanities and social sciences at The University of Hong Kong, traces the ways in which the growth of commercial aviation in Hong Kong turned the city and surrounding region into an economic powerhouse while facilitating an exchange of ideas that shaped the modern age.
In 70 CE, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans led early Christians to claim that this event was an example of divine retribution for the death of Jesus. Narratives promoting this cause-and-effect story of vengeance circulated widely throughout Europe in the medieval period, with frequent alterations designed to appeal to local constituencies and to advance particular political and religious agendas.
In this podcast, Timothy L. Stinson(NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, explores the way that these “vengeance narratives” were both perennial and adaptable. Although the medieval versions of these stories encouraged anti-Judaic bias and persecution, the template of such narratives persisted throughout later ages even while featuring different groups. By understanding how these stories were continuously transformed over time, we can develop a better sense of the way that they helped to shape religious and national forms of identity across Europe.
Prior to the modern era, autobiographical narratives were primarily authored by members of elite classes of society, giving modern-day historians relatively limited insight into the ways that lower-class individuals experienced political, cultural, and economic events of their time. However, the surviving documents that constitute an exception to this rule can give us unprecedented glimpses of everyday life in earlier eras.
In this podcast, Jacob M. Baum (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, outlines the insights that primary sources like the autobiographical notebook of Sebastian Fischer, a deaf sixteenth-century shoemaker, can provide for studies of early modern disability history. Fischer's manuscript not only describes what life was like during this period for an artisan with hearing impairment, but also provides a window into the way that major historical events like the Protestant Reformation were experienced by individuals who lacked economic status and political power.
For the past several decades, authorities have become increasingly concerned about the threat posed by emerging diseases—not only to public health, but also to political and economic stability at a global scale. Attention has been particularly focused on tropical hotspots such as west and central Africa, where human encroachment has increased the likelihood of encountering novel pathogens, with potentially disastrous consequences.
In this podcast episode, Gregg Mitman, Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, explores the ecological, economic, political, and social forces that have simultaneously turned regions of west Africa into profitable sites of natural resource extraction, productive enclaves of biomedical research, and hot zones for pandemic threats.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/gregg-mitman-bloodborne-invasion-politics-of-disease
Over the past several decades, neuroscientific studies have been invoked in order to justify policy decisions and associated legislation. Although such scientific findings are always subject to change or re-interpretation, increasingly, the logic of “brain science” is being equated with a kind of fundamental truth. Practically, this often leads to justifications for programs ranging from cursive writing educational mandates among primary school students to holistic medical interventions intended to prevent mental decline in older age. In this podcast, Jordynn Jack, Chi Omega Term Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores how contemporary public rhetorical strategies have advanced the idea that we are “neurological subjects,” with identities located in and constructed through our cognitive abilities. Ultimately, Jack’s work invites us to consider how we understand and use science in our personal lives and in the public sphere.
Though modernist ballet is often associated with European companies such as the Ballets Russes, the ideas and concepts that emerged from this movement soon found their way around the globe. In Latin countries such as Cuba, this foreign cultural form was adapted to meet local needs and provided an important way to articulate national identity.
In this podcast, Lester Tomé, associate professor of dance at Smith College, discusses how artists such as Alejo Carpentier adopted and reimagined the formal methods of modernist ballet in order to promote an indigenous form of Afro-Cuban culture. In doing so, he suggests, they developed a distinctive visual language through which to resist and oppose widespread colonial stereotypes.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/lester-tome-movement-modernism-carpentiers-transatlantic-ballet
As more of our lives shift online, the question of how speech should be regulated in this digital space becomes increasingly relevant. In response, social media companies have set precedents for regulating language on their private platforms. However, these mechanisms are often designed in order to work in tandem with artificial intelligence-based algorithms that have not yet been fully developed, leaving them instead to be administered inconsistently by human content moderators.
In this podcast, Janny HC Leung, professor of linguistics in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, addresses the ethical and legal questions that arise from these attempts to monitor and evaluate—and sometimes even to block—individuals’ language on social media. As she points out, the evolution of standards and practices around digital discourse has the potential to reshape the concept of free speech as we know it.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/janny-leung-language-law-and-the-limits-of-digital-autonomy
Scholars have traditionally translated the ancient Greek virtue of Sôphrosunê as “temperance” or “chastity,” implicitly suggesting that it is concerned with forms of self-control in the face of desire or dramatic bodily sensations. As a result, this concept has often been downplayed and relegated to the forgotten corners of philosophical inquiry.
In this podcast, Christopher Moore, associate professor of philosophy and Classics at The Pennsylvania State University, restores and explains the complexities of Sôphrosunê for a contemporary audience. Instead of understanding this virtue as a means of moderating and restraining our behavior, we can recognize and celebrate its power to catalyze self-interrogation through an embrace of discipline.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/christopher-moore-sophrosune-self-knowledge
When we read most novels, we assume that characters are the most important components of a story. However, in noteworthy American literature of the segregation era, it is often forms of evidence that structure novelistic worlds, making us recognize and question the ways that details of ordinary life can take on particular significance.
In this podcast episode, Rachel Watson, assistant professor of American literature at Howard University, considers how the treatment of evidence in literature can help us to illuminate the simultaneous development of discourses around race, criminology, and crime science. She suggests that at its best, the crime genre can challenge readers by encouraging them both to question the world around them and to suspend widely held assumptions about identity and typology.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/rachel-watson-evidence-racial-discourse-segregation-era-literature
Though debates about water usage and environmental justice are often conducted in the future tense—with one eye trained on impending catastrophes—the causes are usually rooted in past injustices. For this reason, attempts to understand and avert these crises necessarily involve attending to the voices of those who have suffered them in the past—including the indigenous people of North Carolina.
In this podcast, Ryan E. Emanuel, professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, discusses how members of the Lumbee tribe can provide important insights into both the conservation and protection of the river that bears their name. By attending to their centuries-long and location-specific knowledge of this region, he suggests, we can develop a better understanding of how best to allocate the valuable water resources found in this part of the state.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ryan-e-emanuel-water-in-the-lumbee-world-indigenous-rights-and-the-transformation-of-home
Charisma is a concept we typically use to refer to individuals who fascinate, attract, and captivate us in some way. The word’s modern usage, however, obscures its origins in Christian doctrine. In such contexts, charismatic figures were understood to have a kind of divinely ordained authority and spiritual influence.
In this podcast episode, Molly Worthen, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores the evolution of charisma in the popular consciousness and its role in various historical epochs and movements. From St. Paul to contemporary populist politicians, analyzing the ineffable allure of charisma can help us to understand how power has been produced and wielded in both religious and secular contexts.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/molly-worthen-evolution-of-charismatic-leadership
When mapping the struggle for Black freedom and racial justice, historians have often emphasized the events and organizational efforts that occurred in urban areas, largely led by men. However, in order to take Black Power politics seriously in a more comprehensive fashion, we need to understand how they also emerged from and developed in rural American communities, where the voices and leadership of women were extremely influential.
In this podcast episode, Katherine Mellen Charron, associate professor of history at North Carolina State University, discusses her research into the legacies of local, community-based, rural Black women’s activism in North Carolina. By thinking about how Black Power politics, economics, and culture were affirmed and shaped by women outside of urban centers, we are better able to honor less historically visible forms of political engagement and innovation.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/katherine-charron-activism-beyond-city-women-rural-communities-struggle-for-black-freedom/
Between the 1930s and the 1970s, racialized legislation and subsequent migrations of Black Americans combined to drive explosive population growth in urban centers, which in turn gave rise to the creation of segregated districts and public housing projects. The experience of life in these spaces, which required residents to navigate precarious conditions where distinctions between public and private collapsed, was chronicled by Black women writers of the era.
In this podcast, Jennifer D. Williams, assistant professor of English at Howard University, discusses her research into urban spaces, racial politics, and Black womanhood in the twentieth century. By turning to intimate forms of literary expression like poetry and short stories written by politically engaged women writers, Williams suggests, we can come to terms with how the literature of this period engages in social justice work that remains relevant today.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/jennifer-williams-black-women-writers-legacy-segregated-urban-spaces/
After the ancient Roman Empire embraced Christianity under Emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D., the empire’s culture and politics were significantly transformed. Records of poetic inscriptions found throughout Rome can help us to understand how these public displays both recalled an earlier model of poetic discourse and established new forms of spiritual authority and civic instruction.
In this podcast, Dennis Trout, professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at the University of Missouri, shares insights from his interdisciplinary study of such inscriptions. By considering the way that these epigrams were embedded in the architecture of a city and displayed to an empire in transition, he suggests they go beyond considerations of religion, literature, and culture to illuminate the ways that visual and textual cues were used to send messages to a diverse audience in the ancient world.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/dennis-trout-poetic-inscriptions-ancient-rome/
For the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, the changing nature of American immigration law and policy is not merely an abstract concern. The rise in anti-immigrant sentiment has transformed the lives of young people, who must contend with the uncertainty of their own legal status even as they fear for the safety of their families.
In this podcast episode, Angela Stuesse, associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses her latest collaborative project, which seeks to understand the reality of contemporary immigration in the United States through a personal lens. Animating discourses of ethnography, testimony, and social analysis, Stuesse uses one Mississippi family’s story to illuminate the space between the statistics on American immigration.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/angela-stuesse-story-american-immigration
In the 1930s, the writer Ursula Parrott used her novels, short stories, and screenwriting ventures to portray independent women during a period of immense social change in America. Despite this, like many women writers, Parrott’s legacy has been all but erased from the popular imagination.
In this podcast, Marsha Gordon, professor of film studies at North Carolina State University, delves into the way that Parrott’s independence and professional success existed in a complex relationship to her rather conservative views on gender. Understanding Parrott as a woman out of sync with her own time allows us to understand how she was influenced by the limitations of her society even while she envisioned a more progressive future.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/marsha-gordon-complex-legacy-ursula-parrott/
We tend to think of money as a familiar object that plays a role in our everyday lives. However, when we consider the changing nature of currency in colonial America, money appears differently—as a “social technology for the distribution of value.” Because money allows individuals to represent and share value in direct and visible ways, the transition to the use of paper money in the United States in the eighteenth century supplemented social connections derived from transactions and bolstered economic consumption.
In this podcast, historian Simon Middleton from the College of William and Mary discusses how his work participates in interdisciplinary discourses to examine the cultural, legal, and social dimensions of money. His reflections reach into the present moment by considering how the COVID-19 pandemic and previous recessions make us confront the ways that such financial crises are not necessarily a result of a lack of money, but the result of an uneven division and distribution of global value.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/simon-middleton-changing-forms-of-value-paper-money-18th-century-america/
As commonly understood, slavery in the United States officially came to an end with the surrender of the Confederacy and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Yet various forms of human bondage and forced labor continued across the United States and its territories long after the conclusion of the Civil War and into the twentieth century. In this podcast, historian Christina Snyder from The Pennsylvania State University discusses her work, examining why multiple forms of unfree labor and bondage persisted across the United States long after chattel slavery was abolished.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/christina-snyder-slavery-after-civil-war-how-bondage-persisted/
Erle Stanley Gardner is best remembered as a best-selling author and the creator of the fictional lawyer Perry Mason, a hard-nosed criminal defense attorney with a penchant for taking on hopeless cases. Mason’s heroic efforts to establish the innocence of his clients—first in novels, then films, radio, and television—captured the imaginations of Americans for four decades. Gardner’s interest in highlighting and reversing miscarriages of justice, however, extended well beyond the realm of fiction into the experiences of real-life defendants. He established “The Court of Last Resort,” a project working on behalf of defendants who had suffered from poor legal representation, misinterpretation of evidence, or the malicious actions of police and prosecutors.
In this podcast, Ian Burney, professor of the history of science, technology, and medicine at the University of Manchester, discusses his new book which explores the methods Gardner and his colleagues used to establish the innocence of those wrongly convicted in an era long before the use of DNA evidence, setting precedents for how we think about establishing innocence up to the present moment.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ian-burney-presumed-innocent-legacy-erle-stanley-gardner/
After she tragically died in childbirth in 1932, acclaimed novelist and activist Margery Latimer became lost to history. While her work had drawn comparisons to Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Latimer’s reputation as a writer was overshadowed by her interracial marriage with the poet and novelist Jean Toomer.
In this podcast Emily Lutenski, associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University, discusses Latimer and Toomer’s romantic relationship and intellectual partnership, the scandal that ensued, and the ways their legacies have been shaped as a result.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/emily-lutenski-margery-latimer-jean-toomer/
Research indicates that African Americans are far more likely to get sick than their fellow citizens who are white. Regardless of their age, educational attainment, or socioeconomic circumstances, they are more likely to suffer from severe forms of illness and have shorter life expectancies. While a number of factors play a part in this sad statistical reality, a key underlying factor is the persistence of racial bias in America.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/yolonda-wilson-racial-bias-mortality-pursuit-of-justice/
In this podcast, philosopher Yolonda Wilson from Howard University discusses her work on these issues, focusing particularly on how racial biases affect end-of-life care for African Americans and how we might go about rectifying historic and continuing injustices.
The 15th-century Wars of the Roses between Yorkist and Lancastrian factions often summon images of royal intrigue and courtly splendor. Whether it is one of Shakespeare’s plays or a more scholarly account, histories of this struggle for the English throne tend to privilege the nobility. Art historian and NHC Fellow Sonja Drimmer offers a far different perspective of the era. By extending the political sphere beyond the royal court and into the court of public opinion, Drimmer explores how a newly-formed, larger public played an important role in this decades-long conflict.
In this podcast, Drimmer turns to objects that tell a broader story about how the public participated in a shifting landscape of political language. Ranging from the “funny, to the inept, to the gruesome,” these objects include everything from scrolls testifying to the genealogical legitimacy of nobility, to livery badges that functioned like campaign buttons, to descriptions of severed heads. By delving into the art and objects of 15th-century England, Drimmer recasts the Wars of the Roses as an extended political campaign that cultivated, and depended upon, public support and engagement.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sonja-drimmer-wars-of-the-roses-and-the-court-of-public-opinion/
When we think of the way in which past audiences encountered poems and novels, we often tend to imagine a silent and solitary process. But for many readers, engaging with fiction was a fundamentally collective endeavor, which often involved getting together with a group of friends to read aloud or visit locations depicted in the work of a favorite author. By acknowledging and engaging with these social habits of reading, we can begin to reconstruct the way in which diverse reading publics brought the words that they encountered on the page to life.
In this podcast, Ann Rowland discusses her current research into a particular coterie of Boston readers who regularly gathered to discuss the works of John Keats at the turn of the twentieth century. Through reflecting on the shared reading practices of past audiences, she suggests, we can better understand our own modes of literary engagement in a period that has supposedly witnessed a rapidly declining interest in the written word.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ann-wierda-rowland-reading-the-readers-books-clubs-of-the-past/
In the popular imagination, computers are not only superior to humans in speed and accuracy, but they do their work free from prejudice, treating users equally without regard to race or gender. NHC Fellow Mar Hicks, associate professor of history at Illinois Institute of Technology, is helping complicate our understanding of how computers shape our world as she works this year on a new book exploring how technological systems in Great Britain continue to perpetuate social inequalities.
In this podcast, Hicks discusses the deep history of algorithmic bias and how technology constructs certain people—specifically women and transgender persons—as non-normative, with far-reaching discriminatory consequences for these groups. Building on her previous research on the often forgotten history of technology’s rise and fall in the United Kingdom, Hicks’ scholarship focuses not only on the transphobia programmed into computer systems, but also how resistance to such discrimination cultivated a political class.
Founded by freed slaves in the early nineteenth century, the candomblé temple Casa Branca in Salvador, Bahia, was the first Afro-Brazilian place of worship in Brazil. But despite its religious and historic significance, the story of Casa Branca’s origins has remained the stuff of oral traditions until the recent discovery of written documents by NHC Fellow Lisa Earl Castillo. Castillo is working on a new book which situates the temple and its founders within the greater social history of Brazil and as a place that offers special insight into the lives of freed and enslaved individuals on either side of the Atlantic.
In this podcast, Castillo maps out the process of reconstructing the life histories of nineteenth-century Yoruba- and Gbe-speaking freed people who are remembered today as the founders of the oldest Afro-Brazilian temples. She pays special attention to their legendary return voyages to Africa, where they were not necessarily welcomed “home,” but treated as outsiders. Her work illuminates how Casa Branca is not only an extraordinary story of mobility by freed Africans during the nineteenth century, but also of oral traditions as historical texts.
Proponents of distant reading practices in which computers are used to analyze vast quantities of textual material assert that their quantitative methods simultaneously complement and complicate traditional literary criticism. NHC Fellow Ted Underwood, professor of Information Sciences and of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an innovative leader in the use of digital reading practices, is working on a new book that continues his research using algorithmic models to better understand fiction from the nineteenth century to the present.
In this podcast, Underwood discusses how using the quantitative methodology traditionally found in the social sciences to literary studies can offer new perspectives around questions about genre—and even “microgenre” and reveal previously unperceived shifts in literary production and reception that span the course of centuries.
Between 1891 and 1939 a substantial portion of the land area of states in the American West were set aside for management by the federal government. These so-called “public lands” have been a source of contention ever since, engendering conflict among an assortment of stakeholders looking to use the lands for a variety of purposes—from conservation and habitat protection to mining, grazing, and logging. NHC Fellow Joseph Taylor, professor of history at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is working on a new project examining the legislative history surrounding land conservation in the Progressive era—a story that gave shape to 47% of the West.
In this podcast, Taylor discusses how the controversies surrounding land conservation represent a disconnect between popular conceptions of these lands and more technical understandings rooted in legislation passed by Congress. Often accompanied by population displacement, the term “conservation,” Taylor shows us, cannot be taken at face value—nor can the term “public.” By recentering the political economy surrounding federal lands, which are better understood not necessarily as public lands but as government lands, Taylor’s analysis reveals a “messier” and more complicated story than the one usually told.
Monuments commemorating historical figures, events, and regimes can be found nearly everywhere, yet we often barely notice them. At other times, though, the histories they represent can inflame passions and the monuments themselves become contentious flashpoints for their communities. NHC Fellow Mia Fuller, associate professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is a cultural anthropologist who has focused much of her scholarly work on Italy, particularly the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century and its legacies which still remain.
In this podcast, she discusses her new project, which examines the monuments and symbols of Italy’s fascist past that can still be found sprinkled in locales throughout the country—especially in the Pontine Marshes area, where Mussolini’s largest land-reclamation project took place in the 1930s. As Fuller explains, some of these constructions spark outrage while others are quietly accepted elements of the urban landscape. Drawing from the fields of ethnography, memory studies, and Italian history, her research illuminates the interplays of physical space with political power.
When we think of slavery in the Americas, most of us generally think of people from Africa and their descendants who were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to provide labor for the plantation economies of the New World. But recently, historians have begun to reassess the significance of other forms of slavery in the Americas—specifically the enslavement of millions of indigenous people in the Caribbean and beyond. NHC Fellow Rebecca Goetz, associate professor of history at New York University, is working to recover the history of indigenous slavery as it was practiced by competing colonial powers in the Caribbean and exploring the relationship between the enslavement of native peoples and the development of chattel slavery across the Western Hemisphere.
In this podcast, Goetz problematizes predominant narratives about slavery in the Caribbean, especially those that emphasize the complete disappearance of native peoples. Looking at both larger and smaller islands in the region, her work shows us that many sites (such as Cubaqua or Antigua) were in fact not at all peripheral to this history between the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Goetz discusses the challenges of her historical research—notably, a dearth of archival resources—as well as its importance in challenging monolithic conceptions of the history of enslavement and European settler colonialism.
Since the 1950s, the sounds of Jamaican reggae have drawn global attention to the Caribbean island and its culture. Yet, few critics have examined reggae’s social origins or fully accounted for its phenomenal rise as the music of disaffected youth. Fellow Matthew Smith, professor of history at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, is working to situate reggae within the larger social dynamics of post-World War II Jamaica.
In this podcast, Smith provides an overview of the music’s history and its emergence alongside Jamaican independence in 1962 as well as its parallels with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. He explores how migration—especially between Jamaica and the United States in the mid-twentieth century—facilitated musical creation. Smith’s research show us how reggae music offers a window onto the political construction of Jamaica and its movements for social change.
Traditionally, accounts of the scientific advances of the Renaissance have focused on the contributions of famous individuals like Copernicus whose theories about heavenly bodies radically altered how we understood the arrangement of the universe and our place in it. Increasingly, though, historians have noted striking parallels between the work of figures like Copernicus and their contemporaries in the Islamic world though they’ve not been able to fully explain how these similarities arose. NHC Fellow Robert Morrison, professor of religion at Bowdoin College, has been working to trace the connections between these thinkers.
In this podcast, Morrison talks about his work to uncover the ways that scientific knowledge moved across continents and between cultures during this fertile time in Mediterranean intellectual life as Jewish, Muslim, and Christian merchants crossed paths, encountering and translating each other’s ideas about astrology, medicine, law, and astronomy forming coupling the exchange of goods with an economy of knowledge.
Though it lasted for only a brief period, the Ghurid dynasty provides a fascinating lens through which to consider the religious and political forces that shaped Central Asia during the medieval period. NHC Fellow Alka Patel has spent years in the region examining architectural structures and archival materials to help better understand the Ghurids, situated as they were between the Persianate and Indic worlds, straddling and connecting the traditions of Islamic and Hindu cultures. Patel, an associate professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine, is currently writing what she describes as an “architectural biography” closely examining the archaeological remnants of the Ghurid dynasty.
In this podcast, she explains how the Ghurids’ brief, pivotal moment in the history of Central Asia helped inform life in the region for centuries to come, and how the methodologies of art history, such as the close analysis of style and iconography, can assist in identifying architectural structures’ social and temporal context. Even if architecture itself remains stationary, Patel explains how buildings are the result of many people and ideas over time, elucidating the matrices of history.
Poets have long used ekphrasis—the vivid description of a piece of visual art—as a way of exploring the deep complexity of representation, the relationship between the artist and her art, and to make legible things which may otherwise seem inexpressible. NHC Fellow Meta DuEwa Jones is herself a poet and a scholar of poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is an associate professor of English. She is currently working on a new project exploring the relationship between African American poets and visual artists and the ways that their works speak to one another.
In this podcast, Jones discusses how these texts inform, integrate, and translate the experience of blackness across genres as they trace the cultural underpinnings of the contemporary African Diasporic world. She elucidates the relationship between efforts to tell the story of the “I” and the story of “we”– whether through words, image, or art in the work of artists and writers such as Glenn Ligon, June Jordan, and Shirley Graham Du Bois.
For most of us, learning to read is an important milestone in our intellectual development. This accomplishment is a cornerstone on which our educations and professional lives are built, and one of the primary mechanisms through which we connect with the world. But for some people, specifically those affected by neurological disorders such as dyslexia or dementia, reading can be an experience fraught with challenges. NHC Fellow Matthew Rubery seeks to understand how such “neurodivergent” individuals employ different methodologies of reading, ultimately experiencing and analyzing the world in more complex ways.
In this podcast, he contends that we need to stop understanding reading as a uniform and one-dimensional process. By enlarging our definitions of reading, we can establish more inclusive practices around the way that we view texts, methodologies, and readers themselves.
Since at least the early years of the twentieth century, scholars have taken an interest in the artistic and intellectual productions of so-called “outsiders,” or individuals whose unconventional perspectives and aesthetic expression have often been assumed to result from serious mental illness. These artistic creations and written works are generally defined by idiosyncratic characteristics; they can seem to be obscure, obsessive, inconsistent, and even disconnected from reality itself. Matt ffytche believes that these aesthetic objects—and the ways that “outsider” artists have been classified—deserve to be reconsidered.
In this podcast, he reflects on the problem of classifying individuals (and their art) as “outsiders” even while particular artists embraced the phrase’s anti-normative implications. By asking us to question how and why instances of cultural inclusion vs. exclusion occur, ffytche’s scholarship bears relevance to topics extending far beyond twentieth-century art.
In the opening lines of his most famous poem, “To Althea, From Prison,” Richard Lovelace writes, “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage...” This line expresses a thought common among imprisoned writers across time — that regardless of the conditions of their imprisonment, the human spirit and the poetic imagination cannot be constrained. NHC Fellow Andrea Brady, however, suggests that the relationship between our poetic traditions and bondage has not been adequately explored in prior scholarly work.
In this podcast, Brady discusses her current project, which explores how poets over the centuries have treated both literal and metaphorical forms of bondage, not only as subject matter for their verse but as a powerful force in shaping the lyric tradition.
Five hundred years ago—in February 1519—Hernán Cortés set out from Cuba with an expeditionary force heading for a confrontation with the Mexica, rulers of the Aztec Empire. Two years later, with the sacking of the capital, Tenochtitlan, the Spanish conquest was complete. Over the course of the following century filled with radical upheaval, demographic collapse, plague, mass migration, economic transformation, and cultural dislocation. much of the history and culture of the Aztecs was lost, but what remained was pieced together by indigenous descendants who helped reconstruct an epic history of the Aztec civilization. NHC Fellow Peter Villella, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is currently examining the basis for one of the modern world’s great national stories.
In this podcast, he explains how those postconquest historians creatively combined disparate elements to forge a powerful historical account of indigenous accomplishment that has become a central component of Mexican identity.
Though its viability as a political party was short-lived, the influence of the Federalists extended well beyond the early years of the American republic. After the election of 1800, the party’s fortunes dimmed, and the party dissolved in 1824, but its ideas have continued to shape American institutions and political attitudes up to the present day. NHC Fellow Gretchen Murphy has researched the ways in which women writers have shaped and preserved the Federalist legacy.
In this podcast, she delves into the fundamental importance of religion for the Federalists and the influence of the French Revolution on the party’s vision for the American nation. Drawing from multiple types of sources, including novels, poetry, essays, and letters by women Federalists, Murphy reflects on the ways in which these women confronted a problem which persists today: how can a democracy function without a shared sense of moral authority?
Aristotle’s thinking on a variety of topics has influenced western philosophy for over two millennia. His writings on ethics, in particular—emphasizing human character and ethical psychology—continue to shape contemporary ideas about personal virtue and moral agency. NHC Fellow Audrey Anton, however, has emphasized the importance of understanding the role that vice plays in Aristotle’s philosophy.
In this podcast, Anton presents the four types of persons identified by Aristotle based on the extent to which their knowledge and actions classify them as virtuous or vicious. Most people, she points out, are not ultimately vicious; instead, they are basically good people who lack moral knowledge or succumb to temptation.
With increasing urgency, climate scientists and environmentalists have sought to mobilize public action to address the crisis of global warming. Warning us about the dire need to radically change how we use energy, the ways we grow and distribute food, and many other activities, they’ve described a future in which our planet is increasingly unlivable. But, beyond imagining a world devastated by unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, how might we go about imagining more desirable futures? What resources can we call upon to help us not only avoid disaster but craft a better world? Fellow Joni Adamson, professor of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at Arizona State University, is working on just these questions. In this podcast, she discusses her efforts to pull together threads of work with which she has been engaged for most of her career.
As it has taken shape as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry, animal studies has significantly contributed to our understanding of other species and our relationships with them. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches across the humanities and sciences, animal studies has challenged traditional categories that have long gone unquestioned, such as “nature” and “wildness” that not only clarify perspectives on the lives of animals but human experiences and concepts.
In this podcast, we talk with Harriet Ritvo, who has been a leading voice in animal studies for over 30 years. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the American Society for Environmental History. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center (twice), and the Stanford Humanities Center. Ritvo currently serves as the Arthur J. Connor Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as a trustee of the National Humanities Center.
The influence that medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas has had on Western thought is difficult to fully grasp. Contemporary thinking in fields from political ethics to psychology has been shaped by his writings. But Aquinas’ model of the mind—of how we perceive and contemplate the world—has been ignored or misunderstood by contemporary scholars. National Humanities Center Fellow Thérèse Cory, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, is working on a new book on Aquinas’ account of the intellect and the philosophical traditions from which it emerged.
In this podcast, Cory discusses how, over the years, Aquinas has been extracted from his historical context; she advocates putting him back into conversation with his scholarly influences. By tracing the genealogy of his intellectual formation, from Aristotle to philosophers of the early Muslim world, Cory reminds us why Aquinas’ relevance extends across disciplines and centuries. Specifically, his teachings underscore the transformative power of knowing.
Next year will mark the centennial of the founding of Bauhaus, the German center for aesthetic thought founded by Walter Gropius. Known for its functionalist structures and unadorned style, the movement formally ended in 1933, the final year of the Weimar Republic. Still, its influence continues to this day, informing design choices in a wide variety of fields—from architecture to typography, fashion to household items. National Humanities Center Fellow Elizabeth Otto, associate professor of art history at the University of Buffalo, is completing a book that challenges conventional understandings of one of Europe’s most influential art institutions. Otto’s work uncovers new areas of inquiry, including the school’s engagement with the irrational, the spiritual, and the pursuit of functional perfection.
In this podcast, Otto maps the aesthetic and intellectual lineage of the Bauhaus, paying special attention to the many figures—especially women—who’ve been overshadowed by more celebrated colleagues like Josef Albers and Marcel Breuer, the father of Brutalism. She also addresses origin myths animating the movement, such as the influence of World War I on Bauhaus founders. With attention to questions of gender and sexuality, Otto explores how the legacy of the war complicated ideas of masculinity in Germany during this era, inflecting the idea of the “artist engineer.”
In the 17th century, the notion of the infinite universe was so controversial that believers could be burned at the stake. Today, however, the concept of infinity is commonplace, integrated not only into science and math curricula, but how we understand our world. NHC Fellow John H. Smith, Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine, is currently at work on a project that explores how the concept of infinity not only gained acceptance but also reshaped our thinking in the seemingly disparate realms of mathematics, theology, philosophy, and poetry.
In this podcast, Smith traces the shifting understandings of the infinite across the long 18th century, with particular focus on German figures such as Leibniz and Hegel, as well as intellectual movements including Romanticism and the Enlightenment. His project ultimately locates the infinite at an interdisciplinary crossroads, demonstrating the interconnectedness of the sciences and the humanities.
Historically, issues surrounding psychiatric care in the United States have produced crises of various kinds—perhaps nowhere more so than in the Deep South. Milledgeville, Georgia—featured in the literary works of authors such as Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers—is no exception. The antebellum state capitol, Milledgeville was also home to the state mental hospital, an institution founded in 1842 which eventually grew to become the largest mental hospital in the world. National Humanities Center Fellow Mab Segrest, Fuller-Maathai Professor Emeritus of Gender and Women’s Studies at Connecticut College, is currently at work on a project that considers how the history of Georgia's hospital reveals the intimate relationships between psychiatry and white settler colonialism.
In this podcast, Segrest discusses the social function of mental hospitals in the South. Questions of race, gender, and class underscore her methodology, revealing how psychiatry often was a “handmaiden” to white supremacist practices in the Jim Crow South, including lynching and the eugenics movement. At the nexus of U.S. psychiatry and the emergence of racism, the history of the Milledgeville asylum has broad and urgent implications for today’s mental health facilities and their treatment of patients.
Legalized slavery has been abolished around the world, yet human trafficking remains a significant problem. Though slavery may not take the exact forms it did in the nineteenth century, approximately 45.8 million persons in 167 countries endure modern forms of slavery. National Humanities Center Fellow Laura Murphy, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Modern Slavery Research Project at Loyola University New Orleans, is currently at work on a book about the way survivors of forced labor have mobilized the discourse of slavery in the twenty-first century to reinvigorate their struggles for freedom.
In this podcast, Murphy discusses the generic conventions of the slave narrative and how they complicate our notions of what it means to be free. For instance, in what she terms the “not-yet-freedom narrative,” survivors of slavery find their lives still circumscribed by systemic injustices, even after emancipation. By approaching the topic of slavery through the lens provided by literary analysis, Murphy argues it is possible to discover new insights into the conventions surrounding modern enslavement and more fully understand the experiences of those caught up in them.
First emerging in the Italian Renaissance, the sonnet was used to document and address a problem, such as the pain of unrequited love. Under the shadow of slavery and then Jim Crow, African American poets from Phillis Wheatley to Natasha Trethewey have adopted the sonnet’s 14-line form to poetically register political protest. National Humanities Center Fellow Hollis Robbins, from Johns Hopkins University, is currently at work on the first book-length examination of the African American sonnet tradition.
In this podcast, Robbins discusses how the sonnet both emerges out of and transforms the tradition of Platonic metaphysical ideal love. Drawing on examples from writers such as Claude McKay and Gwendolyn Brooks, Robbins explains how the formal qualities of the sonnet—structured around an argument—exemplify what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called “double-consciousness.” To this day, writers such as Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith enlist its octaves, voltas, and sestets to narrate the African American experience.
The average American produces four and a half pounds of trash every single day, and, as a whole, the U.S. generates nearly a quarter of a billion tons of garbage each year. Yet one person’s trash is another’s treasure. For instance, entire television channels are devoted to hoarders, and artists around the world craft “garbage art” from found materials. So what can we learn about ourselves from what we discard and what we keep? What stories are contained in the detritus of contemporary life?
National Humanities Center Fellow Stephanie Foote, Jackson and Nichols Professor of English at West Virginia University, is beginning to answer these questions. In this podcast, she discusses her current work on the “art of garbage” and the intersections of consumer culture, the global economy, and the environment. Foote also speculates about how contemporary literature (such as the emergence of “climate fiction”) mediates the presence of planetary waste. In one form or another, whether celebrated or spurned, garbage, it turns out, is always with us.
In the decades following the American Civil War, African American intellectuals focused much of their attention beyond the borders of the United States and, in doing so, engaged global histories of colonization, slavery, immigration, and imperialism. They also found occasion to celebrate the traditions, achievements, and contributions made by Africans around the world. While a significant body of scholarship attends to the work of politicians, clergy, actors, and artists, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of black historians.
National Humanities Center Fellow Stephen G. Hall might be called a “historian of historians.” His current research, spanning the era between 1885 and 1960, focuses on the global engagement of African American historians, many of whom were trained and taught in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In this podcast, Hall introduces and expands on important issues at play in his study: the sources black historians enlisted to frame critical events, the community they engaged beyond the walls of the academy, and the ways their discourse was intertwined with activism, from anti-imperialism to Pan-Africanism to the Civil Rights Movement. Illuminating the often overlooked scholarly productions of African American historians, Hall’s findings are enriching our understanding of black intellectual history.
Over the past century, revolutions in technology and increased mobility have fostered connections across vast spaces and among different cultures. Still, Americans’ sense of regional identity remains strong.
NHC Fellow Wendy Griswold, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and professor of sociology at Northwestern University, has studied how literary culture helps produce and maintain regional identity for much of her career. In this podcast, she discusses the third installment of her ongoing project exploring how art and literature are integral to American “place-making.” Building on her previous work, she argues that by drawing on the fields of neurobiology and neuroaesthetics—examining how our brains respond to different sensations and stimuli—we may be able to shed new light on the ways we experience places and form lasting emotional attachments to them.
A democratic society relies on the ability of citizens to address one another in a measured and temperate fashion, yet civil debate in recent years has become increasingly contentious and polarized. In this podcast, NHC Fellow John McGowan, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses how literature—specifically comedy—can help us recognize our shared humanity and help us find ways to transcend our differences.
Touching on works as diverse as James Joyce's “Ulysses,” the novels of Anthony Trollope and Iris Murdoch, and situation comedies like “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation,” McGowan explains how the conventions of comedy such as happy endings, vernacular language, and plots involving relatable, everyday characters offer models for managing change and dealing with the messiness of human interactions. Ultimately, McGowan suggests, these works may provide alternative social blueprints for a public sphere that is more conducive to courtesy and tolerance, where it may be possible even to cherish other perspectives—however different they may be from our own.
For years, public discourse and policy debates about people with disabilities have focused on the rights of those with medically recognized impairments. Increasingly, however, scholars in the field of disability studies, including Fellow Nancy J. Hirschmann, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, are reshaping the way we see our bodies, the range of freedoms we enjoy, and the limitations we experience.
In this podcast, Hirschmann helps us to begin to make sense of the complex relationship between freedom and disability. She speaks with NHC Vice President for Scholarly Programs Tania Munz about her latest book project, Freedom, Power, and Disability, which builds on her previous scholarship on the intersections of politics, gender, and philosophy.
As Hirschmann notes, thinkers for centuries framed disability as a problem or disorder to be overcome or cured—a phenomenon now known as the “medical model.” Beginning in the 1960s, however, disability scholars began to offer a new “social model” which recognizes the ways society is organized to address the needs of certain kinds of bodies over others, whether through the built environment or societal attitudes.
The social model of disability, Hirschmann argues, helps us reconceive barriers to freedom in a broader way. At the same time, however, she recognizes the model’s limitations—specifically, the risk of oversimplifying disability as mere “difference.” Along with other scholars, she advocates for what she terms a “third” or “ecological model.” Here, the body itself is not merely a social product, but also a material entity, which allows us to more fully understand the roles of subjectivity and desire in freedom.
Hirschmann concludes this fascinating podcast by reflecting on what political theory can offer disability studies—and, conversely, how disability studies can help remap the coordinates of the field of political science.
Since the early modern era, history has been largely viewed through an anthropocentric lens, skewing towards the involvement of humans. David Christian (National Humanities Center Fellow 2006–07) flips this narrative by zooming out to see history—specifically, Big History—on a larger scale, measured by geological and cosmological time. Big History is a model that embeds human history within the history of the larger universe, including the biosphere, the Earth, and the solar system. Interdisciplinary in scope, it brings together fields as seemingly disparate as cosmology, anthropology, and geology. In terms of narratology, Big History offers what Christian calls “a unifying origin story” that explains our origin and place in the universe, bridging together the humanities with the social sciences.
Turning to pedagogical implications, Christian also discusses how we can harness technology to help younger students conceptualize various time scales—human, geological, and cosmological—in mapping a digital landscape. Ultimately, the teaching of Big History raises crucial epistemological questions about how we attempt to make sense of our place in the world.
David Christian (D.Phil. Oxford, 1974) is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, but since the 1980s he has become interested in world history and in history at very large scales and across many disciplines. In 2004, he published the first monograph on Big History, “Maps of Time.” With Bill Gates, he is co-founder of the Big History Project (https://school.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive), which has built free online high-school courses in big history. Since 2013, he has been Director of Macquarie University's Big History Institute (http://bighistory.mq.edu.au), and led the collaboration of twenty academics across all faculties to develop Macquarie University's MOOC on Big History, “Big History: Connecting Knowledge” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/big-history) on the Coursera platform.
Scholars in gender and sexuality studies have largely ignored or dismissed attempts to explain the causes of sexual deviation for a variety of reasons. In this podcast, National Humanities Center Fellow Benjamin Kahan discusses how his work, exploring “the historical etiology of sexuality,” moves past those scholars’ dismissal of early sexuality theories in hopes of producing a fuller understanding of how contemporary attitudes and notions about sexuality developed. By considering lost models of sexuality and sexual aberration—dating back to the 1840s—Kahan describes the emergence of ideas that can be found in the work of researchers such as Havelock Ellis as well as in the writings of authors like Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf.
Benjamin Kahan is an assistant professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of “Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life” (2013) and the editor of Heinrich Kaan’s “‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality” (2016). This year, as a Fellow at the Center, his project is “Sexual Etiologies and the Great Paradigm Shift.”
Non-human, post-human, anti-human. In recent years, historians, political theorists, philosophers and others have increasingly tried to think beyond an anthropocentric perspective to gain insights on a wide range of questions. But these ways of thinking have a long precedent in American fiction.
In this podcast, NHC Fellow Kate Marshall, associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, discusses how weird fiction, cosmic realism, and pseudo-science fiction have imaginatively grappled with non-human points of view from the late 19th century to the present.
While we often think of Renaissance-era Florence and the surrounding area as brimming with intellectual inquiry, artistic genius, and political intrigue, music and poetry were also important elements of life and to the Studia Humanitatis, the core of early modern education.
In this podcast, Fellow Blake Wilson, professor of music at Dickinson College discusses his current project exploring the music and oral performance traditions of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance — how it was composed and performed as well as its relationship to other art forms in creating the rich civic and cultural life of the Renaissance.
Surviving accounts of the foundation of the early Christian church are extremely limited, leaving scholars with few sources beyond the narrative found in the fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles. And, for centuries, questions have persisted about the book of Acts itself: Who wrote it and for whom? What was the document's purpose? And, how historically reliable is the account it provides?
In this podcast, Fellow Douglas Campbell, professor of New Testament in the Divinity School at Duke University discusses his current project to address some of these questions. Campbell is one of the world's foremost authorities on the life and thought of the apostle Paul. His publications on the topic include, most recently, "Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography" (2014) as well as "The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul" (2009) and "The Quest for Paul's Gospel: A Suggested Strategy" (2005).
Most people would agree that judging people based on generalizations related to their skin color or gender, religion or nationality is wrong. Yet this is a common practice in all societies. So the question arises, is it ever okay to use stereotypes? And, if so, when?
Erin Beeghly is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, where her research focuses on the intersection of ethics, epistemology, political philosophy and moral philosophy. This year, as the Philip L. Quinn Fellow at the National Humanities Center, she is working on "Seeing Difference: The Ethics and Epistemology of Stereotyping," which examines the conditions under which judging people by group membership is wrong.
Beyond their inspirational and devotional power, what other functions do religious works of art serve? From antiquity through the medieval period, practitioners of many religious traditions throughout central Asia used works of art to teach followers religious histories, parables, and central tenets of their faith. How does this use inform our appreciation of these works and what can we learn from examining these religious practices?
Zsuzsanna Gulácsi is professor of art history, Asian studies, and comparative religious studies at Northern Arizona University. She has written extensively on art and religion across Asia in the late ancient and medieval periods. Gulácsi was previously a Fellow at the Center in 2006–07 and has returned this year to work on a new project comparing the use of art by various religions in the region to attract and instruct converts.
For centuries before the arrival of Europeans, trade routes connected the various peoples who lived throughout the American Southwest and Mexico, and trade among these groups remained an important source of economic vitality and cultural exchange even after the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. In later years, these routes formed the basis of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, connecting merchants and communities from Mexico City to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Tatiana Seijas is associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University where her research focuses on early modern economics, global Spanish empire, and the American Southwest. This year, as a Fellow at the Center she is working on "First Routes: Indigenous Trade and Travel between the American Southwest and Mexico".
Beginning as a small group of intellectual ideologues, the Shining Path grew to become a significant insurgency movement whose violent practices resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Peruvians in the late twentieth century. However, to understand the Shining Path's history and its influence, it is important to understand its origins and the motivations of the individuals who formed its leadership.
Miguel La Serna is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his research focuses on the relationship between culture, memory, and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America. This year, as a Fellow at the Center he is working on a narrative history about the Shining Path, titled "The Last Revolution: Shining Path and the War of the End of the World".
Since its founding over 50 years ago, perceptions of the Black Panther Party have varied widely, often shaped by misinformation — about the Party's motivations, its relations with other organizations, its influence in the U.S. and around the world. In this conversation, historian Jakobi Williams discusses the challenges facing scholars in reconstructing the history of the Black Panther Party, the common misconceptions that continue to shape views of the movement and its leaders, and the ways that the organization helped inspire resistance groups in other countries.
Jakobi Williams is associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington where his research focuses on twentieth-century U.S. history and African American history. This year, as a Fellow at the Center he is working on "'Neighborhoods First': The Black Panther Party as a Model for Community Organizing in the U.S. and Abroad," expanding on his previous work on the history of resistance and social justice revolutions found within the historic African American community.
Shakespeare's plays are full of the influences of the supernatural—spirits, magic, temptation—haunting the lives of characters and shaping their actions. In this conversation, literary scholar Mary Floyd-Wilson discusses how these demonic representations reflect questions that were very much on the minds of Elizabethan-era theater-goers and offer a valuable perspective on contemporary debates of the period and shifts in thinking about questions of religion, of autonomy, personality, and the mind.
Mary Floyd-Wilson is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where her research focuses on English literature of the early modern period. She was previously a Fellow at the Center in 2008-09 and returns this year to work on a new project, "The Tempter or the Tempted: Demonic Causality on the Shakespearean Stage".
The use of geospatial technologies allows the interactions of place, space, time, and scale to be more obvious to teachers and students. Often there is an over-emphasis on the chronology of historical events without a strong consideration for their connections to geography. Geospatial technologies allow students to raise the critical ability to answer not only the important question of “where?” but also “why there?” With an emphasis on inquiry-based teaching and learning, Chris Bunin provides insights on the ways that GIS tools contribute to a deeper understanding of the humanities.
Chris Bunin is a teacher of A.P. Human Geography, World History, and Geospatial Technologies at Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. During the past decade he has collaborated on projects focused on leveraging geospatial technologies and geo-literacy in the classroom. These include: “The Virginia Experiment” and “America on the World Stage” Teaching American History Projects; the iSTEM Teacher Scholars Program: An Applied Geospatial Curriculum for Middle Schools; “Transatlantic Teacher Scholars: Change Over Time and Place in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery”; Esri’s GeoInquiries for US History and Human Geography; the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistics in Schools Program; and the award winning book Jamestown to Appomattox: Mapping U.S. History Using GIS (Carte Diem Press). Chris is also assistant professor of Geography at Piedmont Virginia Community College and a member of the Virginia Geographic Alliance Steering Committee.
While historians have increasingly marked the Haitian Revolution as a key moment in the history of the Atlantic world, literary depictions of the revolution and events surrounding it have remained little known among contemporary readers. By exploring a broad range of works from writers living in the Atlantic world, Marlene Daut has uncovered a transatlantic abolitionist literary culture that was shaped in many ways by imagining Haiti.
Marlene L. Daut is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (2015), examined the connection between 18th- and 19th-century scientific debates about race and the Haitian Revolution in U.S., Haitian, and European colonial literatures. Her second book, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (forthcoming) will be the first single-authored, book-length exploration of the Haitian author and politician Baron de Vastey. This year, as the Josephus Daniels Fellow at the National Humanities Center she is working on An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery).
The banjo links disparate musical and cultural traditions — from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States — and its history is deeply interwoven with the history of those places. In this podcast, host Robert Newman talks with Laurent Dubois about this history and his book, The Banjo: America’s African Instrument, published earlier this year by Harvard University Press.
Laurent Dubois is professor of history and romance studies and faculty director of the Forum for Scholars and Publics at Duke University. He is a specialist on the history and culture of the Atlantic world, with a focus on the Caribbean and particularly Haiti. His previous books include Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012), Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010), Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004), and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (2004). Dubois worked on The Banjo: America’s African Instrument while he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2008–09. As a Fellow at the Center again this year, he is working on a biography of dancer, choreographer, and activist Katherine Dunham.
Contention over questions surrounding immigration and citizenship have been foregrounded in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but how does the current debate relate to America’s historical treatment of foreigners and the establishment of birthright citizenship in the U.S. Constitution? In this podcast, host Richard Schramm talks with Kunal Parker about this history and helps frame current discourse as it relates to legal history.
Kunal Parker is professor of law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami. In 2014-15, he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center where he completed Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 which appeared earlier this year from Cambridge University Press.
In part 2 of this interview, Florence Dore and host Robert Newman continue to explore the surprising reciprocity between rock and literature.They also discuss the conference "Novel Sounds"—upcoming October 14-15 at the National Humanities Center—which will bring together scholars, critics, and performers to examine rock’s broader connections to a wide array of social, historical, and cultural concerns.
While it is not difficult to perceive rock ‘n’ roll’s profound influence on American culture since the mid-1950s, we seldom consider the surprising reciprocity between rock and serious literature. In this podcast, host Robert Newman talks with Florence Dore about the rock-literature nexus and on the ways that rock has both reflected and helped shape our national heritage. They also discuss the conference "Novel Sounds"—upcoming October 14-15, 2016 at the National Humanities Center—which will bring together scholars, critics, and performers to examine rock’s broader connections to a wide array of social, historical, and cultural concerns.
Florence Dore is is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American literature, popular music, and media theory. She is the author of "The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism" (2005) and founding coeditor of the Post 45 Series from Standard University Press. She was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2008–09 and returns this year as a member of the Fellows’ class of 2016-17.
In recent years, historians, literary theorists, archaeologists, geographers and others have been exploring space—both physical and metaphorical—and the ways that it shapes, and is shaped by, us. In this podcast, host Richard Schramm talks with John Corrigan about “the spatial humanities,” a turn in academic research that brings together scholars from diverse fields, using new digital tools to better understand how we live in our spaces and how those spaces influence economics, politics, and culture.
John Corrigan is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at Florida State University where his research focuses on American religious history, religion and emotion, religious intolerance, and the spatial humanities. He is the author or editor of over twenty books on these topics including, most recently, "The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion," ed. (2008); "Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History," with Lynn Neal (2010); and "Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America" (2015). He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2014–15.
Americans have long pictured themselves as all but free of religious intolerance and have difficulty coming to terms with the kinds of religious conflict and violence that occur in other parts of the world. In this podcast, host Richard Schramm talks with John Corrigan about America’s often forgotten history of religious intolerance despite our ideals and how that history has been all but lost. Their conversation also offers a preview of an NHC webinar, “Religious Freedom and Religious Intolerance in America,” which took place on Thursday, March 24, 2016.
John Corrigan is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at Florida State University where his research focuses on American religious history, religion and emotion, religious intolerance, and the spatial humanities. He is the author or editor of over twenty books on these topics including, most recently, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. (2008); Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History, with Lynn Neal (2010); and Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America (2015). He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2014–15.