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In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.
In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism. Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.
Our guest is: Dr. Padraic X. Scanlan, who is an associate professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Inquiry. The author of two previous books, he lives in Toronto.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance editor. She the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
The Social Construction of Race
Climate Change
We Refuse
Where Does Research Really Begin?
The First and Last King of Haiti
Finishing Your Book When Life Is A Disaster
Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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The library is an important partner in academic success for students and professors. So why do so many people overlook this key resource? Karen McCoy takes us inside her job on two college campuses, unpacking what librarians do, and why she’s so happy to help everyone find exactly what they need.
Our guest is: Karen B. McCoy, who is a librarian currently living in Northern California. Most days, she can be found answering reference questions or conducting information literacy sessions in both the Sierra College Library and American River College Library. Outside of her librarian career, she maintains a blog where she interviews other authors. She has reviewed books for Library Journal and Children’s Literature, and she sold a feature article to School Library Journal entitled, “What Teens are Really Reading.” She also contributed a chapter to Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Her debut novel, The Etiquette of Voles, releases in June 2025 through Artemesia Publishing/Kinkajou Press.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance editor for scholarly projects. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Book Banning and The National Coalition Against Censorship
Once Upon A Tome
That Librarian
Understanding Disinformation
The Grant Writing Guide
Where Does Research Really Begin
Archival Etiquette
Becoming The Writer You Already Are
Project Management for Researchers
Find Your Argument
The Guide To Getting Unstuck
Dealing with the Fs
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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What is the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people? Why is radical nationalism on the rise in Europe and throughout the world? In Living Right: Far Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton UP, 2024), Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences. Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Dr. Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications.
In this episode we consider: the power of listening, locating and unpacking complexities, navigating field work, and handling difficult situations.
Our guest is: Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka, who is a sociocultural anthropologist. Before joining the University of Montreal, she was a senior research fellow at the University of Vienna and held guest lecturer and guest professor positions at various universities: Central European University, University of Bayreuth, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. She is the author of Living right: far-right youth activists in contemporary Europe, published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Dear Miss Perkins
Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism
Secret Harvests
Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom
Immigration Realities
The Ungrateful Refugee
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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In You Have More Influence Than You Think (Norton, 2023) social psychologist Vanessa Bohns draws from her original research to illustrate why we fail to recognize the influence we have, and how that lack of awareness can lead us to miss opportunities or accidentally misuse our power. Weaving together compelling stories with cutting edge science, Dr. Bohns answers the questions we all want to know (but may be afraid to ask): How much did she take to heart what I said earlier? Do they know they can push back on my suggestions? Did he notice whether I was there today? Will they agree to help me if I ask?
Whether attending a meeting, sharing a post online, or mustering the nerve to ask for a favor, we often assume our actions, input, and requests will be overlooked or rejected. Bohns and her work demonstrate that people see us, listen to us, and agree to do things for us much more than we realize—for better, and worse. You Have More Influence Than You Think offers science-based strategies for observing the effect we have on others, reconsidering our fear of rejection, and even, sometimes, pulling back to use our influence less. It is a call to stop searching for ways to gain influence you don’t have and to start recognizing the influence you don’t realize you already have.
Our guest is: Dr. Vanessa Bohns, who is the Braunstein Family Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University’s ILR School. Professor Bohns holds a PhD in Psychology from Columbia University and an AB from Brown University. Her research has been published in top academic journals in psychology, management, and law, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and The Economist, among others. She is the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Talking to Strangers
Understanding Disinformation
Do You Have Imposter Syndrome?
Leading from the Margins
Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides
Teaching While Nerdy
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century—but they've never been as intense as they are today.
In No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (UNC Press, 2021), Dr. Karen L. Cox offers an eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments. Dr. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.
Our guest is: Dr. Karen L. Cox, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her other books include Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture and Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Campus Monuments
Researching Racial Injustice
A Conversation with Curators from the Smithsonian
The Names of All the Flowers
What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions
Stolen Fragments
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by downloading, assigning and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Ages before the dawn of modern medicine, wild animals were harnessing the power of nature’s pharmacy to heal themselves. In Doctors by Nature (Princeton UP, 2025), Dr. Jaap de Roode argues that we have underestimated the healing potential of nature for too long and shows how the study of self-medicating animals could impact the practice of human medicine. Drawing on illuminating interviews with leading scientists from around the globe as well as his own pioneering research on monarch butterflies, Dr. de Roode demonstrates how animals of all kinds—from ants to apes, from bees to bears, and from cats to caterpillars—use various forms of medicine to treat their own ailments and those of their relatives. We meet apes that swallow leaves to dislodge worms, sparrows that use cigarette butts to repel parasites, and bees that incorporate sticky resin into their hives to combat pathogens.
Dr. De Roode asks whether these astonishing behaviors are learned or innate and explains why, now more than ever, we need to apply the lessons from medicating animals—it can pave the way for healthier livestock, more sustainable habitats for wild pollinators, and a host of other benefits. Doctors by Nature takes readers into a realm often thought to be the exclusive domain of humans, exploring how scientists are turning to the medical knowledge of the animal kingdom to improve agriculture, create better lives for our pets, and develop new pharmaceutical drugs.
Our guest is: Dr. Jaap de Roode, who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Biology at Emory University, where he is director of the Infectious Diseases across Scales Training Program, which trains graduate students in interdisciplinary science to study and control infectious disease.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of Changing Oceans
The Killer Whale Journals
Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household
Bugs: A Day in the Life
Endless Forms: The Surprising World of Wasps
The Well-Gardened Mind and The Science Showing Why Time in Nature is Good For You
Women in Shark Sciences
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, announced a recent purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus, just discovered, carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how could Green acquire such a rare item? The answers, which Mazza spent the next ten years uncovering, came as a shock: the fragment had come from a famous collection held at Oxford University, and its rightful owners had no idea it had been sold. The letter to the Romans was not the only extraordinary piece in the Green collection. They soon announced newly recovered fragments from the Gospels and writings of Sappho. Dr. Mazza's quest to confirm the provenance of these priceless fragments revealed shadowy global networks that make big business of ancient manuscripts, from the Greens' Museum of the Bible and world-famous auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, to antique shops in Jerusalem and Istanbul, dealers on eBay, and into the collections of renowned museums and universities.
Dr. Mazza's investigation informs her book, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts (Redwood Press, 2024), and forces us to ask what happens when the supposed custodians of our ancient heritage act in ways that threaten to destroy it. Stolen Fragments illuminates how these recent dealings are not isolated events, but the inevitable result of longstanding colonial practices and the outcome of generations of scholars who have profited from extracting the cultural heritage of places they claim they wish to preserve. Where is the boundary between protection and exploitation, between scholarship and larceny?
Our guest is: Dr. Roberta Mazza, who is Associate Professor of Papyrology at the University of Bologna. She previously held positions at the University of Manchester, where she was honorary curator of the Manchester Museum, and at the University of California, Berkeley.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
A Conversation with Curators from the Smithsonian
The House on Henry Street
Archival Etiquette: What to know before you go
Project Management for Researchers
Where Research Begins
The Museum of Failure
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Leaders who introduce anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash. In What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions (Princeton UP, 2025), Susan Sturm explores how to navigate the contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships, and institutions. She offers strategies and stories for confronting racism within predominantly white institutions, describing how change agents can move beyond talk to build the architecture of full participation. Professor Sturm argues that although we cannot avoid the contradictions built into efforts to confront racism, we can make them into engines of cross-racial reflection, bridge building, and institutional reimagination, rather than falling into a Groundhog Day–like trap of repeated failures.
Drawing on her decades of experience researching and working with institutions to help them become more equitable and inclusive, she identifies three persistent paradoxes inherent in anti-racism work. These are the paradox of racialized power, whereby anti-racism requires white people to lean into and yet step back from exercising power; the paradox of racial salience, which means that effective efforts must explicitly name and address race while also framing their goals in universal terms other than race; and the paradox of racialized institutions, which must drive anti-racism work while simultaneously being the target of it. Sturm shows how people and institutions can cultivate the capacity to straddle these contradictions, enabling those in different racial positions to discover their linked fate and become the catalysts for long-term change. The book includes thoughtful and critical responses from Goodwin Liu, Freeman Hrabowski, and Anurima Bhargava.
Our guest is: Professor Susan Sturm, who is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the Founding Director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. She is the coauthor with Lani Guinier, of Who's Qualified? A New Democracy Forum on the Future of Affirmative Action.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom
Black Women, Ivory Tower
Transforming Hispanic Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice
Black Woman on Board
We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States
Leading from the Margins
Presumed Incompetent
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies. Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health (NYU Press, 2025), by Dr. Wylin D. Wilson, addresses this crisis from a bioethical standpoint. It offers a critique of mainstream bioethics as having embraced the perspective of its mainly white, male progenitors, limiting the extent to which it is positioned to engage the issues that particularly affect vulnerable populations. This book makes the provocative but essential case that because African American women—across almost every health indicator—fare worse than others, we must not only include, but center, Black women’s experiences and voices in bioethics discourse and practice.
Womanist Bioethics develops the first specifically womanist form of bioethics, focused on the diverse vulnerabilities and multiple oppressions that women of color face. This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable. It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances. At its core, the volume offers a new, broad-based approach to bioethics that is meant as a corrective to mainstream bioethics’ privileging of white, particularly male, experiences, and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women.
Our guest is: Dr. Wylin D. Wilson, who is associate professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School. Her work lies at the intersection of religion, gender, and bioethics. Her academic interests also include rural bioethics and Black church studies. Prior to joining Duke Divinity School in 2020, she was a teaching faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. She is the theologian-in-residence for the Children's Defense Fund and is a member of the American Academy of Religion’s Bioethics and Religion Program Unit Steering Committee. Among her publications is her book, Economic Ethics and the Black Church.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic
Life podcast.
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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For many, technology offers hope for the future―that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome―not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time. To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves.
In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP, 2024), Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Professor Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.
Our guest is: Professor Shannon Vallor, who is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and AI at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is a standing member of Stanford's One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) and member of the Oversight Board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Professor Vallor joined the Futures Institute in 2020 following a career in the United States as a leader in the ethics of emerging technologies, including a post as a visiting AI Ethicist at Google from 2018-2020. She is the author of The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking; and Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting; and is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology. She serves as advisor to government and industry bodies on responsible AI and data ethics, and is Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the UKRI research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
More Than A Glitch
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Our book is: Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized (U Michigan Press, 2025), by Dr. Shiri Noy, which tackles the how, what, and why of project management. It offers step-by-step guidance on choosing tools and developing a personalized system that will help the reader manage and organize their research so that steps and decisions are documented for accountability and reproducibility. Readers will find worksheets they can adapt to their own needs, priorities, and research as well as practical tips on issues ranging from emails to scheduling. Suitable for work across methods, experience levels, and disciplines and adaptable for those working alone, with others, or as team managers, this book will guide readers between various research stages–from planning, to execution, to adjustment of research projects big and small.
The worksheets discussed in the episode can be found here.
Our guest is: Dr. Shiri Noy, who is Associate Professor of Sociology at Denison University. Her research and teaching interests are primarily in political sociology, and centered on development, science and religion, and mixed methods. She is the author of Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America, and Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and executive producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
The Grant Writing Guide
Where Does Research Begin?
Getting from to-do to done!
Imposter Syndrome
Attention Skills
Dealing with Rejection
The Dissertation to Book Workbook
Stylish Academic Writing
The Book Proposal Book
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Our book is: The Burnout Workbook, by Drs. Amelia Nagoski and Emily Nagoski, the experts behind the New York Times bestselling book Burnout. This interactive workbook is designed to help you solve the cycle of overwhelm and exhaustion and empower yourself to create positive change. We all want to achieve wellness. But wellness is not a state of mind or a state of being—it’s a state of action. It’s the freedom to oscillate through all the cycles of being human: from effort to rest, sleeping to waking, autonomy to connection. Burnout, on the other hand, happens when we get stuck. The Burnout Workbook will help you notice when you get stuck and show you how to get unstuck. Inside it you’ll find engaging questions, exercises to practice skills, visual guides, stories, and more! Feel better, minimize stress, manage your emotions, and live a more joyful life. Whether or not you've read Burnout, this workbook will help you learn what true wellness can look like in your life.
You can find a worksheet from the book here.
Our guest is: Dr. Amelia Nagoski. She holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts, and was an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Music at Western New England University. Her job is to run around waving her arms and making funny noises and generally doing whatever it takes to help singers get in touch with their internal experience.
The co-author is: Dr. Emily Nagoski, who is the award-winning author of Come as You Are; and Come Together; and co-author of Burnout, and The Burnout Workbook. She earned an MS in counseling and a PhD in health behavior, both from Indiana University, with clinical and research training at the Kinsey Institute. Her job is to travel all over the world, training therapists, medical professionals, college students, and the general public about the science of women’s sexual wellbeing.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
How Can Mindfulness Help
Meditation For Beginners
Getting From To-Do to Done!
Attention Skills
You Will Get Through This
Imposter Syndrome
Leaving Academia: Pursuing Life Abroad
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life -
Studies show that students who have a positive outlook on their lives outperform students who don’t. Is positive thinking a skill? Can it be taught?
Our article is: “Teaching Positive Psychology Skills at school may be one way to help student mental health and happiness,” by Dr. Kai Zhuang Shum, published in The Conversation, which explores how the components of happiness and connection can be applied to classroom settings around the world. Amid the reduced access to mental health services for many students, and the rising rates of student stress and depression, researchers are finding that positive psychology interventions make a real difference. “Students who’ve been introduced to science-based ideas about happiness,” Dr. Shum writes, “feel more satisfied with life.” She joins us for this episode to explain more.
Our guest is: Dr. Kai Zhuang Shum, who is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP) and a Licensed Psychologist. She serves as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville School Psychology Program. She specializes in positive psychology, motivation, anxiety (including OCD), attention, time management, and well-being (happiness).
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
Mindfulness
The Well-Gardened Mind
Inside Look at Campus Mental Wellness Services
You Will Get Through This
Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection
Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD
Make a Meaningful Life
Meditation
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that make up one of the most visible features of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American life. The rise of big box retail since the 1960s has transformed environments on both local and global scales. Almost everyone has explored the aisles of big box stores. The allure of “everyday low prices” and brightly colored products of every kind connect shoppers with a global marketplace. Contributors join a growing conversation between business and environmental history, addressing the ways American retail institutions have affected physical and cultural ecologies around the world. Essays on Walmart, Target, Cabela’s, REI, and Bass Pro Shops assess the “bigness” of these superstores from “smokestacks to coat racks” and contend that their ecological impacts are not limited to the footprints of parking lots and manufacturing but also play a didactic role in educating consumers about their relationships with the environment. A model for historians seeking to bring business and environmental histories together in their analyses of merchant capital’s role in the landscapes of everyday life and how it has remade human relationships with nature, Big Box USA is a must-read for students and scholars of the environment, business, sustainability, retail professionals, and a general audience.
Our guest is: Dr. Rachel Gross, who is assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches US environmental, business, and public history. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America, and the co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She uses her PhD in history to explore what stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
Disabled Ecologies
The Killer Whale Journals
Stylish Academic Writing
A Conversation with the editor of University of Wyoming Press
The Peer Review
At Every Depth
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Our book is: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) by Dr. Amy Reading, which is a lively and intimate biography of trailblazing and era-defining New Yorker editor Katharine S. White. White helped build the magazine’s prestigious legacy and transform the 20th century literary landscape for women. In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.
This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words. White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life. Based on years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.
Our guest is: Dr. Amy Reading. Her book, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She is also the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in upstate New York, where she serves on the board of her local independent bookstore, Buffalo Street Books.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She uses her PhD in history to explore what stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
Claire Myers Owens and the Banned Book
Dear Miss Perkins
Leaving Academia
The Misadventures of A Rare Bookseller
We Take Our Cities With Us
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life -
Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Dr. Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson was the owner of Blue Spring Farm, a veteran of the War of 1812, and the US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted. What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Johnson’s relationship with Chinn ruined his political career but as Dr. Myers compellingly demonstrates, it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors.
Our guest is: Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, and The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
Never Caught
The Story of President Lincoln, from No Way They Were Gay
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
Running From Bondage
How Girls Achieve
Remembering Lucille
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life -
Our book is: Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra (UNC Press, 2025), by Ericka Verba, which explores the life of Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967). Parra is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Canción (New Song). Her renowned song "Gracias a la vida" has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre. In this remarkable biography, Dr. Ericka Verba traces Parra's radical life and multifaceted artistic trajectory across Latin America and Europe and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Verba paints a vivid and nuanced picture of Parra's life. From her modest beginnings in southern Chile to her untimely death, Parra was an exceptionally complex and talented woman who exposed social injustice in Latin America to the world through her powerful and poignant songwriting. This examination of her creative, political, and personal life, flaws and all, illuminates the depth and agency of Parra's journey as she invented and reinvented herself in her struggle to be recognized as an artist on her own terms.
CW: suicide
Our guest is: Dr. Ericka Verba, who is Director and Professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright, and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She is a founding member of SCALAS (Southern California Association of Latin American Studies) and the recipient of the E. Bradford Burns Award for service to the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies. She is the author of the book Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
Remembering Lucille
I'm Possible
Dear Miss Perkins
Sophonisba Breckinridge
The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life -
How do we discern what is factual from what isn’t? In this episode, Dr. Colleen Sinclair joins us to discuss the functions of disinformation, and to unpack how our own biases, emotions and vulnerabilities influence what we are willing to believe.
Our guest is: Dr. H. Colleen Sinclair, Associate Research Professor of Social Psychology at Louisiana State University. She takes a theory-grounded, multi-method approach to tackling social issues. She works on: understanding the hazards of the information highway, including dis/misinformation; investigating means to improve equity and access in educational, policy, and correctional settings; and examining challenges within intergroup and interpersonal relations. She is the author of “Seven Ways to Avoid Becoming a Misinformation Superspreader,” and “Disinformation Is Rampant On Social Media,” both published in The Conversation, as well as book chapters, and other publications.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
Talking to Strangers
Belonging
Who Gets Believed
Attention Skills
Where Does Research Begin?
Tell Me What You Want
The Museum of Failure
Finding Yourself in Difficult Conversations?
Imposter Syndrome
Dealing with Rejection
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life -
Henry Christophe was born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and fought to overthrow the British in North America before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue—as Haiti was then called—to end slavery. He rose to power and became their king. In his time, he was popular and famous the world over. So how did he become an enigma?
In The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, Dr. Marlene L. Daut reclaims the life story of this controversial revolutionary and only king of Haiti, drawing from a trove of previously overlooked sources to paint a captivating history of his life and the awe-inspiring kingdom he built. Peeling back the layers of myth and misconception reveals a man driven by both noble ideals and profound flaws, as unforgettable as he is enigmatic. More than just a biography, The First and Last King of Haiti is an exploration of power, ambition, and the human spirit. From his pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution to his coronation as king and eventual demise, this book is testament to the enduring allure of those who dare to defy the odds and shape the course of nations. The First and Last King of Haiti is a story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval.
Our guest is: Dr. Marlene Daut, who is Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University. Her books include Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism; Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865; Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution; and The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. She is co-editor of the Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology, and her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Essence Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The Conversation, New Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Comparative Literature, among others. She is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners might also enjoy:
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
Never Caught, with Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Selling Anti-Slavery
Running From Bondage
Leading from the Margins
Shoutin in the Fire
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life -
In this episode, we explore one woman’s struggle to protect her culture and her family amidst the backdrop of a military occupation.
Our book is: Call Her Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2025), by Tara Dorabji, which is set in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the picturesque mountain village of Poshkarbal is home to lush cherry and apple orchards and a thriving community—one divided by a patrolled border. Aisha and her mother Noorjahan live on the outskirts—two women alone in a world dominated by men. As the village midwife, Noorjahan teaches Aisha how to heal using local herbs and remedies. Isolated but content, Aisha is shocked when Noorjahan decides it is time for her to attend the village school as few girls do. Despite the taunting of her classmates and the teacher’s initial resistance to having her in the class, Aisha becomes a star student, destined for college. When Aisha becomes engaged to a local boy, she is forced to abandon her dreams of college. She comforts herself by staying on her ancestral land, creating a nourishing life with her children and husband. But her mother’s secrets haunt her, and the growing military presence in Poshkarbal forces Aisha to make impossible choices. Call Her Freedom is also an investigation of colonialism, militarization, sacrifice, honor, and fighting for your home.
Our guest is: Tara Dorabji, who is the author of Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Tara’s publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies: Good Girls Marry Doctors and All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives in Northern California with her family and rabbit.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
The Things We Didn't Know
I Kick and I Fly
Whiskey Tender
The Translators Daughter
Who Gets Believed
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by our sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life - もっと表示する
