Nhc Podcasts

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://nationalhumanitiesc

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 ter

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 Cas

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.

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.

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

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

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’ socia

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 Shirle

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 comp

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 field

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.

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 Tec

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