By Robert Harrison
The narcotic of intelligent conversation
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May 8, 2020-- Robert Harrison discusses with Christopher Lydon social media, biotechnology, and René Girard's theory of mimetic desire.
This episode is a pre-recorded show that originally aired on March 4th, 2019 on Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source” podcast.In this conversation, Christopher Lydon and professor Robert Harrison discuss René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire. Additionally, professor Harrison also...
Professor Watkin is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. At its broadest, his research explores how people make sense of the world, and how they interact with ideas and positions different from their own....
With our recording studio at KZSU temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, professor Robert Harrison has decided to open the Entitled Opinions Happy Hour Bar, offering up some small shots of poetry, on the house! We inaugurate our happy hour...
This show is a recording of an online meeting that was held on Sunday April 5th, 2020. In this discussion professor Robert Harrison speaks on Boccaccio's Decameron, with particular emphasis on the following novelle: Second Day, story #5; Third Day,...
In this episode, professor Robert Harrison reflects on the ways in which the present Coronavirus pandemic gives new resonance to Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death of 1348. This monologue was recorded from Robert’s...
In this episode, professor Harrison reflects on the symbolism of willows and their connection to thresholds. He includes discussions of Japanese willow stories, Algernon Blackwood, and poems by the pre-rafalite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti.
Pau is a graduate student in the ILAC (Iberian and Latin American cultures) department at Stanford University. He recently submitted his dissertation, and he will be graduating this year (2019). Pau has studied Philosophy, History, Greek Tragedy and Cinema. He has...
Marisa Galvez is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. She specializes in medieval literature and culture, especially the lyric and romance of Continental Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Her scholarship focuses on such topics as crusade, performance,...
May 28, 2019-- In this episode filmmaker and author Werner Herzog discusses his remarkable book Of Walking in Ice, first published in 1978. The audio in this show is a recording of a live event that took place at Stanford...
In this episode filmmaker and author Werner Herzog discusses his remarkable book “Of Walking in Ice”, first published in 1978. The audio in this show is a recording of a live event that took place at Stanford University on May...
In this episode professor Harrison reads from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "Time of Useful Consciousness", published in 2012. Ferlinghetti turned 100 years old on March 24, 2019.
Kai Carlson-Wee grew up on the Minnesota prairie. He received his BA in English from the University of Minnesota and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first collection of poems, RAIL, was published by BOA...
Note: This segment serves as a prologue to the extended conversation on the topic of "The American Road", which will air next week. In this episode, Kai speaks about how he first became a poet, and he reads a few...
In this monologue professor Robert Harrison reflects on the mysteries of the color white, and its various symbolic associations.
Donnie Hasseltine is a U.S. Marine Corps officer currently stationed in the Bay Area with the 23d Marine Regiment who served in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, the Joint Military Intelligence College,...
Jeremy Sabol has taught as a Lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE) on and off since 2003. Jeremy majored in physics and literature as an undergraduate, then received his Ph.D. in French. His dissertation examined the...
April 11, 2019-- In this episode, the hosts of the KZSU podcast Really, Bro? interview professor Harrison on the topic of love.
In this 20 minute conversation, two Stanford undergraduates, Evan Kanji and Sammy Potter, interview our host professor Harrison on the topic of love.Evan and Sammy are the hosts of the KZSU show “Really, Bro?” If you are interested in knowing/hearing...
In this final episode of the season, our host Robert Harrison reflects on summer, the seasons, and the poetry of life on planet Earth.
Alison McQueen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought. Alison’s recently published book Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, traces the responses of three...
Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is also Professor by courtesy appointment in the Departments of History and Art & Art History.Turner’s research and writing explore media,...
Quinn Slobodian is a historian of modern German and international history with a focus on North-South politics, social movements, and the intellectual history of neoliberalism.He is the author of Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany, and most...
Yoshihiro Francis "Frank" Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West...
May 16, 2018-- A conversation with professor Dan Edelstein on human rights and his forthcoming book: On the Spirit of Rights.
Professor Dan Edelstein works for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests in literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities. Most recently, he has completed a book manuscript on the history of natural and human rights from the...
Priya Nelson is an editor at the University of Chicago Press. She acquires books for the Press’s long-standing and distinguished lists in anthropology and history. Exchange, value, religion, urban studies, media, epistemology, social theory, and ethnographic writing are topics of special...
Professor Alexander Key received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in May 2012 and started working at Stanford that same year. Professor Key is a scholar of Classical Arabic literature...
Dr Andrew Hui is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College. He received his PhD from Princeton University in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a graduate of St John’s College, Annapolis. From 2009-2012, he was a postdoctoral...
Lena Herzog is a visual artist and photographer who lives in Los Angeles. Born in the Ural mountains of Russia, she moved to the city of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) to study Languages and Literature at Leningrad University. She immigrated...
Richard Rorty is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He is credited with reviving the philosophical school of American pragmatism and challenging the accepted pieties of analytic philosophy. He championed “quietism,” which he says attempts “to...
Entitled Opinions is on hiatus
On the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, Robert Harrison and Professor Andrea Nightingale engage in a lively conversation about Walden. This year our nation celebrates the bicentennial of Henry David Thoreau. But few of the commemorations have considered Thoreau...
July 7, 2017--A conversation with William Hurlbut on the ethical implications of CRISPR-Cas9 and human intervention in the genetic makeup of life.
A conversation with William Hurlbut on the ethical implications of CRISPR-Cas9 and human intervention in the genetic makeup of life. William B. Hurlbut, MD, is Adjunct Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical School. After receiving his undergraduate and medical...
An internationally-known and award-winning lecturer on communication and media, Dr. McLuhan has over 40 years’ teaching experience in subjects ranging from high-speed reading techniques to literature, communication theory, media, culture, and Egyptology. He has taught at many colleges and universities throughout the...
Jay Kadis was born in Oakland, California. He has played guitar since high school, initially with Misanthropes, a popular bay area band of the late 1960s, whose highlights included playing the Fillmore Auditorium and opening for Muddy Waters. Jay has...
Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is a lecturer in the Structured Liberal Education program at Stanford University. She earned her PhD from Stanford in 2016 in French, where she taught both language and literature. She has been published in Modern Language Notes...
May 30, 2017--A conversation with Sam Ginn on Artificial Intelligence, Heidegger, and the Singularity.
Sam Ginn is a second year undergraduate student at Stanford University. He is a computer science major interested in human consciousness and whether human consciousness is artificially replicable. Sam is also a participant in the philosophical reading group at Stanford...
Who is Donald Trump, and what does he stand for? Do we know? Does he himself know? Or is he caught in that precarious state of disorientation that characterizes our current political predicament? The public discourse is heated, the language inflammatory....
Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most controversial thinkers in the world. In many ways, he is the heir of Friedrich Nietzsche, who is sometimes said to have inaugurated the 20th century. On Entitled Opinions, host Robert Harrison opens his...
“Mary Shelley is a dissenting voice”: Inga Pierson on Frankenstein and the Age of Science January 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, and the occasion has been commemorated with celebrations, conferences,...
“It has happened. So it can happen again." Philip Gourevitch on genocide We live in an era of genocides. Author Philip Gourevitch is one of its experts, probing how genocide happens, how the murderers rationalize their participation, and how they...
June 8, 2016--A conversation with the scholar and writer Rebecca Pekron on the life and work of Arthur Rimbaud.
Dr. Rebecca Pekron recently received her doctorate from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation "Que reste-t-il? [What remains?]" Poetic Approaches to Immortality: Baudelaire and After explores the concept of immortality in the funerary poetry of the nineteenth century. Dr....
Monika Greenleaf is a comparative literature scholar who teaches in the Department of Slavic and the Department of Comparative Literature here at Stanford. She is of Polish extraction herself and specializes in Polish and Russian literature. She is the author of...
Valerie earned her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 2015. She currently teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford and is working on a book about public memory and the defeat...
May 18, 2016--Alice Kaplan, John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University, on Albert Camus and "The Stranger".