Hopkins Press Podcasts

Today we are talking with Emily Cousens, who is an assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Northeastern University, London, and their expertise focuses on trans feminist philosophy and history. They are also the UK lead for the Digital Transgender Archive. They are the author of Trans Feminist Epistemologies in the US Second Wave, which is the first book to explore the philosophical and intellectual contributions of trans individuals in the 1970s. Emily’s got a new article in L'esprit Créateur called “Subjectivity Without Sex? The Materialist Trans Feminist Potential in Monique Wittig’s Non-Fiction” This is part of a special issue of L'esprit Créateur devoted to Monique Wittig, and this whole issue is available free to all because L'esprit Créateur is part of our Subscribe to Open (S2O) Open Access initiative. Click through in the show notes to learn more about this great new initiative, and especially to read some exciting new scholarship about Monique Wittig.

On today's episode, we talk with David Shiffman, author of Why Sharks Matter, about his recent study of how scientists are engaging social media: “Scientists No Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky." In this episode, we explore the findings of the survey and discuss some of the reasons why this shift has occurred. A marine conservation biologist and public science engagement specialist based in Washington, DC, David Shiffman is a prolific writer, with words appearing in National Geographic, the Washington Post, Scientific American, SCUBA magazine, his blog Southern Fried Science, and, of course, his 2022 Hopkins Press book, Why Sharks Matter. Follow him on the social media platform of your choice: @WhySharksMatter

Today we talking with Sarah M. Misemer, a professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M. She has a new article out in South Central Review’s "Worlds In Crisis" special issue, which is called “What a Bawd from the Renaissance Can Teach Us about AI: Celestina, Robots, and Free Will," Dr. Misemer's article takes a look back at a piece of bawdy Spanish Renaissance literature, La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, and considers what it has to say about human free will in the age of AI robots.

We are kicking off Season 4 of the pod with David Hollinger, who is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History, emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialties are American intellectual history and American ethnoracial history, and today we’ll talk to him about his new article for Social Research: An International Quarterly, entitled “The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia” Dr. Hollinger’s new article is part of a new special issue called “The Embattled University,” a stellar issue which also features contributions from Judith Butler, Lisa Anderson, Albena Azamanova, Ahmed Bawa, Supriya Chaudhuri, Nicholas B. Dirks, Len Gutkin, and Jonathan Veitch. It's a highly recommended issue, especially for those with a stake in the future of higher education.

Koritha Mitchell is is a public intellectual, a professor of English, a literary historian, an award-winning author and cultural critic, and as of last year she is also a member of the Hopkins Press Advisory Board. Her work has already had quite an impact both within the academy as well as in the larger public sphere. Her article "Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care", which was published in African American Review in 2018, has impacted both the academy and the mainstream. Thousands of readers are still finding the article each year, making it one of our consistently most-read Hopkins Press Journal articles on Project MUSE. In our recent Hopkins Press Podcast interview, Mitchell defines her groundbreaking concept of "know-your-place aggression" as "a reaction to the success of people who are not supposed to be successful," and the idea has resonated into recent articles about Junot Diaz in Chronicle of Higher Education and Shedeur Sanders in Esquire, and a 2024 interview with Mitchell published in Public Books brought her work to the attention of numerous new readers. Over the years, Mitchell has been a prolific contributor to several of the journals that call Hopkins Press home, including Callaloo, African American Review, American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

On this episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, we sat down in the library of the Hopkins Press offices with Milan Terlunen, author of an article in the new issue of Book History entitled “What We Can(’t) Know Before We Read: Towards a Theory of the Pre-Reading Environment." Dr. Terlunen coins this term, "the pre-reading environment" to talk about all the ways we come to know things about a text — a book, a film, etc. — before we read it, if we ever read it. Terlunen's article focuses on newspaper reviews of Agatha Christie's 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Twitter discussions about Hanya Yanagihara's 2016 novel A Little Life, but as you'll learn, pre-reading environments include a broad range of information, from advertising and cover art to spoiler alerts, content warnings, and even film rating systems. Milan Terlunen is a currently the 2024-25 Tabb Center/AGHI Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins who specializes in public and digital humanities, with a particular emphasis on podcasting. Dr. Terlunen is the co-founder of the Humanities Podcast Network and the host of the How To Read podcast. This Spring, he is convening a series of podcasting round tables called What Makes Podcasting Accessible?, featuring podcasters across the Hopkins community and beyond. Beginning February 27 and running through April, these round tables will be available to attend both in person and streaming as well. On March 26, Hopkins Press Podcast host Rahne Alexander will be among the guests participating in the What Makes Podcasting Accessible? round table.

On today's episode, we talk with Scott Gelber, a professor of education who currently serves as chair of the Education Department at Wheaton College about his recent article for Review of Higher Education is titled "Does Academic Freedom Protect Pedagogical Autonomy?" and discuss the origins of the idea "academic freedom" and how it's considered regarding pedagogy today. "Does Academic Freedom Protect Pedagogical Autonomy?" is available to read for free on Project MUSE through 30 November 2024 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/937142 About Scott Gelber https://departments.wheatoncollege.edu/faculty/scott-gelber/ Scott Gelber is a historian whose work focuses on the development of American education during the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. He is the author of Grading the College: A History of Evaluating Teaching and Learning (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), Courtrooms and Classrooms: A Legal History of American College Access, 1860-1960 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), and The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), which won the Linda Eisenmann Prize of the History of Education Society. Gelber has published articles and essays in the American Journal of Education, American Journal of Legal History, Journal of Social History, and History of Education Quarterly, among others. His research has been supported by the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He is working on two research projects: a history of learning disabilities and a study of federal financial aid during the New Deal. Before arriving at Wheaton, Gelber taught high school in New York City and supervised student teachers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Scott Gelber - Grading the College: A History of Evaluating Teaching and Learning https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12156/grading-college Scott Gelber - Courtrooms and Classrooms: A Legal History of College Access, 1860−1960 https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11347/courtrooms-and-classrooms Jonathan Zimmerman - The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12000/amateur-hour