The Humanities Pod Archive

Season 2: 2021-22

  1. Tweets of the Un-mastered Class: Exploring the Freedom on the Move Database with Edward Baptist
    Ed Baptist, Cornell history professor, joins Paul and Annette to discuss the Freedom on the Move database and related pedagogical projects. This work by Baptist and many other scholars, educators, and volunteers aims to shift the narrative surrounding slavery in America, bringing together tens of thousands of newspaper “wanted” ads for freedom seekers. These ads inadvertently bear witness to the names, lives, and personalities of self-liberators who otherwise have been effaced from history—while also highlighting the complicity of mainstream newspapers and their subscribers in attempting to subjugate “runaway property.”
  2. “Above all nations is…”: The Fraught Legacy of Goldwin Smith with Joanne Lee and Angel Nugroho
    Angel Nugroho and Joanne Lee, two undergraduate students from Cornell’s Humanities Scholars Program, sit down with Paul Fleming to discuss the fraught legacy of Goldwin Smith, Cornell’s first academic star. Through collaborative archival research, Angel and Joanne share their unique perspectives on Goldwin Smith’s misogyny against the backdrop of women’s burgeoning access to public, academic, and legal spaces in the Victorian Finger Lakes region.
  3. History wrapped up in song: “Singing Freedom” with Tsitsi Jaji, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and Ed Baptist
    Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, poet and associate professor of English at Duke Tsitsi Jaji, and Cornell professor of history Ed Baptist, talk with Annette about ’Singing Freedom,’ a multi-layered collaboration with leading Black American composers and performers to create musical responses to materials in the Freedom on the Move archive.

Season 1: 2020-21

  1. Indigenous Dispossession and the Founding of Cornell: Part 1 with Jon Parmenter
    Cornell associate professor of history Jon Parmenter's new research adds to the emerging conversations on America’s land-grant universities to tell the early story of Cornell University and Ezra Cornell’s acquisition of land grant scrips.
  2. Indigenous Dispossession and the Founding of Cornell: Part 2 with Michael Witgen

    Michael Witgen, professor of History and American Culture and twice former director of Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, provides insight into how non-removal treaties incrementally restricted traditional lands and life-ways for Anishinaabe while benefiting white settlers throughout the 19th century. Beyond his academic work, Michael also shares personal insights on generations of Native resilience in the Great Lakes from his position as a direct lineal descendant of a key Ojibwe signatory to the 1842 treaty that soon became one of the financial engines for establishing Cornell University. 

  3. Shaping Emotions in Late Ancient Christianity with Georgia Frank
    Georgia Frank, 2020-21 Society Fellow and Charles A. Dana Professor of Religion at Colgate University, takes us back to the first 600 years of Christianity to explore the power of song and participatory performances in reenacting and fabricating emotions. Georgia shares insights from her research on bodily experience in ancient Mediterranean religions, including methods and metaphors by which early Christians shaped a collective identity.

  4. Sartorial Self-Fashioning and the Legacies of Enslavement with Kimberly Kay Lamm
    Kimberly Kay Lamm, 2020-21 Society Fellow and associate professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, introduces us to writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their impact on Black women's cultural representation today.

  5. Shutting off the Gaslight with Kate Manne
    Kate Manne, 2018-19 “Authority” Faculty Fellow and associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University takes listeners behind the pages of her latest book “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.” Discussing concepts such as “himpathy,” “mansplaining,” and “gaslighting” Kate shares stories from her writing process, earlier philosophical roots, and where she finds the strength to keep fighting on behalf of women and girls today.

  6. Crafting Belief from Medieval Dreamscapes to Thai Buddhist Temples with Adin Lears and Anthony Irwin
    2020-21 'Fabrication' Fellows, Adin Lears, assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Anthony Lovenheim Irwin, scholar of Asian religions, engage in a conversation that ranges from creatures and creaturehood in Piers Plowman to craft and construction in Thai Buddhism, finding common ground in questions of spirituality and belief, language and craft, as they consider the ethics and poetics of 'Fabrication.'

  7. Rural Poetics: Part 1 with Nikki Wallschlaeger
    In this episode, author Nikki Wallschlaeger reads 11 poems from her latest published collection of poetry-- Waterbaby (2021, Copper Canyon Press). Nikki also speaks with Rural Poetics host Marty Cain to contextualize her work, sharing stories insights into her writing process and geographic inspirations.

  8. Rural Poetics: Part 2 with Nancy Bereano
    This episode features Nancy Bereano, founder of Ithaca’s groundbreaking, award-winning lesbian and feminist press, Firebrand Books (1985-2000). Speaking with Rural Poetics host Alec Pollak, Bereano reflects on the heyday of feminist small-press publishing, Ithaca’s queer social scene, and the early days of publishing notable authors such as Alison Bechdel, Leslie Feinberg, and Audre Lorde.

  9. Rural Poetics: Part 3 with Tim Earley
    This third episode of the Rural Poetics podcast series features poetry author Tim Earley, visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Earley’s dynamic range of diction mixes the academic vocabulary of continental theory with his own roots of Appalachian vernacular English. Tim’s work directly confronts the class hierarchies of U.S. poetry communities, giving audiences a language to better understand the complexity of contemporary rural life.

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