Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. He has said that "‘Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole."

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator.

In this conversation: the importance of holistic understanding in art history; postmodernism and theory-driven vs. object-centered criticism; literal-mindedness and abstraction vs. embodied and emotional understanding; power and self-aggrandizement vs. wonder and awe; the power of beauty and the criticism of Dave Hickey; Kandinsky vs. Malevich; AI in art; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and more!

Mai Wang is an assistant professor of literature at UT Dallas, where she teaches Asian American and Chinese diasporic literature. 

Her first book project, The Asian American Renaissance, examines the imaginative alliances formed between diasporic Asian American authors and their nineteenth-century American predecessors.

In this conversation: How Asian American authors have formed imaginative alliances with their 19th century predecessors; Eileen Chang and Emerson's concept of negative freedom; Carlos Bulosan and America Is in the Heart; and much more!

Michael Thomas is curator of The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples at the Meadows Museum, Dallas, as well as From Texas to the World: Common Ground at UT Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Art.

In this conversation: What the Bourbons discovered in 18th-century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum; the effect of the Grand Tour; 18th-century archaeological techniques; highlights of the exhibition; artists at the Spanish royal court, and more!

Gerytades: An Aristophanes Play... sort of, by poet and translator A.M. Juster, is out now from Contubernales Publishing.

In this conversation: How Gerytades was lost and found; what makes for great comedy; timeliness and timelessness in human nature; how to approach a play that survives in fragments; the fate of light verse; literature, humor, and the underworld; approaches to translating Latin; and much more!

"Dragon Eye," Thomas Riccio's immersive video installation documenting the culture of the Miao people of China, was recently on view at the SP/N Gallery at UT Dallas.

In this conversation: The process of visiting and doing research with the Miao people in remote mountain villages; cultural preservation in the face of modernity; "Form Fatigue"; an example of a healing ritual; the relationship between Indigenous rituals and Western performance; doing theater in Chicago, Alaska, and Dallas; anthropology and AI; Sophia Robot: Post Human Being; and more!

Thomas Locke Hobbs is a photographer whose books include L.A. Vedute, which was shortlisted for Aperture Photobook of the Year, and Rampitas.

In this conversation: Cities in the U.S., Peru and Colombia; domestic architecture, density and class division; negative space in the built environment; Eugène Atget and photo history; season, climate, and mood in Los Angeles; the photo book as object; and more!

Franklin Einspruch is the editor of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art, by Walter Darby Bannard, and the proprietor of Dissident Muse Journal.

In this conversation: Why the aphorism?; the significance of abstract art and of Clement Greenberg; the place of commitment in art; how to teach art; the relationship between creativity, intuition, imagination, and habit; the practice of art criticism; and more!

Erika Doss is the author of Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (University of Chicago Press).

In this conversation: why art historians have often neglected the intersection of art and faith in modernism; the fluidity of religion in modernity; modern artists vs. religious artists; comparing Christian Science, Bahá’í, occultism, and Byzantine Catholicism; dominant and marginal American identities; and more!

Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University, with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty, is the author of Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame, 2022). The journal Modern Theology recently devoted a forum to this book, with contributions from Cyril O'Regan, Kevin Hart, William Desmond, Ben Quash, and Anne M. Carpenter, and a response by the author.

In this conversation: The path from Minding the Modern to Incomprehensible Certainty; what is an image?; which figures were included in the book (and which were not but might have been); how the Renaissance and Baroque periods fit into the book's argument; the problem of disciplinarity and specialization; phenomenology in contrast to other critical theories; the relevance of Gerschom Scholem's Walter Benjamin; and more!

Gary Saul Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He is the author of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press).

In this episode: How Russian literature differs from English or French literature; contrasting the 19th and 20th centuries; the role of revolutionary violence; the importance of small moments in shaping history; translation recommendations; suggestions on short Russian novels; and more!