April 13, 2010--Robert Harrison speaks with Stanford history professor Paula Findlen about Athanasius Kircher, 17th-century German Jesuit scholar.

Mark Mancall is an expert on the history, religions and cultures of central and southeast Asia. Arriving at Stanford in 1965, Professor Mancall directed the Overseas Studies Program at Stanford from 1973 to 1985, and has led numerous Stanford Travel/Study journeys to China, India, Nepal, Central Asia, Indonesia, Tibet and Bhutan.

Positions: Founder and Director, Stanford Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE), 1973-2007

Stanford Courses Taught: Chinese history, Buddhism, Buddhist social and political theory, South Asian history, the history of socialism and Marxism, and Israeli history. Has also taught at Harvard, El Colegio de Mexico and the University of Haifa, Israel.

Academic History: BA, UCLA; PhD, Harvard University

Vincent Barletta specializes in Iberian literatures and cultures of the medieval and early modern periods. He is the author of Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (U of Minnesota P, 2005), for which he was awarded the 2007 La corónica International Book Award. He is also the editor and translator of Francisco Núñez […]

April 6, 2010--Robert Harrison speaks with Stanford history professor Mark Mancall about Karl Marx, the misappropriation and misunderstanding of his ideas, and his legacy today.

March 2, 2010--Robert Harrison speaks with Yale professor Giuseppe Mazzotta on Tasso, Ariosto, and Italian epic poetry.

Giuseppe Mazzotta is Director of Graduate Studies and the Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian and the Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. He has written a number of essays about every century of Italian literary history. His books include: Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. (Princeton, 1979); The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron (Princeton, 1986); Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, 1993); The Worlds of Petrarch (Duke UP, 1993); The New Map of the World: the Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton, 1998) (Italian translation, Turin: Einaudi, 2001); Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment (Toronto UP, 2001) (Italian translation, Palermo: Sellerio 2008). He has also edited or co-edited several boooks, such as Critical Essays on Dante (Hall, 1991) and Master Regis (Fordham UP, 1985). In 2008, he published the Norton edition of Dante's Inferno (translated by M. Palma).

Jay Kadiswas 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 written and performed original rock music with several bands, including Urban Renewal and Offbeats. He has built home studios, recorded and produced dozens of albums including many on Dexter Records, which he started to help promote the projects he produced. Jay is interested in all aspects of music and recording technology, working on projects from early music to rock as recording engineer, producer, editor, and musician. He has taught audio recording classes at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University since 1991 and has enjoyed working as CCRMA's audio engineer with some of the best electronic music performers and composers in live concert productions and recording.

February 23, 2010--Robert Harrison speaks with audio engineer Jay Kadis about transistors, psycho-acoustics,

rock 'n roll, and the future of music in the digital age.

February 16, 2010--Robert Harrison speaks with Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis about her writing.

Gwyneth Lewis, the first poet laureate of Wales, has published seven books of poetry, including Parables & Faxes (1995), Zero Gravity (1998), Y Llofrudd Iaith ('The Language Murderer,' 1999), and Chaotic Angels (2005) .  Her poetry collections have won prestigious awards, such as the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize.  She has published two non-fiction books, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (2005), which recounts a voyage which she made with her husband on a small boat from Cardiff to North Africa.  Gwyneth was a scholar at Girton College, Cambridge and was awarded a double first in English literature and the Laurie Hart Prize for outstanding intellectual work. She received a D.Phil in English from Oxford, having written a thesis on eighteenth-century literary forgery. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the Welsh Academi and a NESTA Fellow. NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, the organisation that invests in UK creativity and innovation. In 2005 she was elected Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University. In the past she spent three years in the US as a Harkness Fellow and was a documentary producer and director at BBC Wales, where she won a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts award). She left the BBC to become a freelance writer.  She is currently a Writer Fellow at Stanford University (2009-2010).  Her most recent poetry book A Hospital Odyssey (2010) recounts the experiences of a woman whose husband has been diagnosed with cancer.