Being Human

George Lewis is a groundbreaking trombonist and composer as well as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. Lewis’ career as a musician has been closely tied to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a group founded in Chicago in 1965 to nurture creative and experimental music. Since 1971, Lewis has performed and recorded with a number of the group’s members, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell. Lewis is also well-known for his work with computers and electronic music, including his software Voyager, which listens to and improvises with human performers. Since the 1990’s, he has also achieved success as a scholar, notably with his 2008 book A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, which won the American Book Award in 2009.

Marcia Chatelain is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University. Dr. Chatelain’s research focuses on a wide range of issues in African American history, including African American migration, women and girls history, and race and food. Her first book, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration, focuses on the experience of the great migration for young African American women—a group of people that scholars frequently fail to recognize or fully explore. In 2014, she gained national attention for creating the hashtag “FergusonSyllabus” on Twitter, and urging educators at all levels, and in all fields, to focus classroom discussion on the events surrounding Michael Brown’s shooting. The inspiration, she says, came from thinking of all the students in Ferguson who wouldn’t be able to go back to school as planned, and all of the empty desks and classrooms that would sit waiting.

This episode features an interview with Peter Holland, the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Holland is one of the leading critics of Shakespeare-in-performance, and has published on Shakespeare in a wide variety of formats, including scholarly journals, books, dictionary entries, and theater programs. For all of his scholarly acumen, listeners will quickly learn that Professor Holland is deeply committed to the idea that Shakespeare (and the humanities in general) should be fun, and shouldn’t shy away from the fact that they provide pleasure to readers and viewers alike.

In this episode, we interview Anthony Bogues is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana Studies, and Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Professor Bogues began his academic career at the University of the West Indies in his native Jamaica and moved to Brown in the year 2000. In this interview, we focus on the broad range of topics that he has written on throughout his career, including intellectual and political history, literature and literary criticism, and most recently the visual arts.

This episode features an interview with Margaret Homans, professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale. In the early 70’s, Professor Homans was an undergraduate at Yale in the earliest years of co-education at that university. Since then, she has established herself as an important feminist critic as well as a mentor to young women looking to follow in her footsteps. Our interview focuses on her career as a literary scholar and the impact her work has had on her profession and the world more broadly.

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker based in Paris. In 2006, the French magazine TelQuel published an interview with Taïa in which he openly discussed his homosexuality for the first time. At this point, he says, he went from being “the new hip Moroccan writer” to “the new hip gay Moroccan writer.” In this interview, we focus on Taïa’s life, writing, and directorial debut in the film Salvation Army (2013).

This inaugural episode of The University of Pittsburgh Year of the Humanities podcast features an interview with Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University. As a scholar, Dr. Cassuto has written several books on American literature and culture; as a columnist, Cassuto writes a regular column for the Chronicle called “the graduate advisor,” in which he focuses on the current state of graduate education in American colleges and universities. The interview focuses on Professor Cassuto’s work within and beyond the University, and his thoughts on how to bridge the two.