Farah Bakaari talks about Trace, a core concept in deconstruction, that denotes an absent presence, a mark of something that is no longer there. She talks about how in her own work she has used the concept of trace to write about legacies of colonialism and slave trade in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, for […]

Hannah Zeavin talks about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. If therapy is always mediated, teletherapy is any form of therapy in which that mediation is more clearly legible. This mediated practice is the topic of her new book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021). Hannah is […]

Stephen Guy-Bray talks about sexuality, a concept that brings together the the use of sexual metaphors in the description of textual production and the erotics that inhere in reading praxes. Among other things, this concept is a critique of the use of popular heteronormative metaphors of reproduction to describe the creation of literature. Stephen Guy-Bray […]

Torsa Ghosal talks about Cognitive Cultural Studies, a field that entails methodologies that situate the human mind in historical and cultural contexts, sometimes working against models of the mind proceeding from the Cognitive Sciences. This includes inquiries into how narratives mediate knowledge about cognition, the subject of her new book Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, […]

Helena DiGiusti talks about @WikiVictorian, the Twitter account that she runs. More than a traditional wiki, it embodies the randomness and miscellaneous nature of so much of Victorian cultures. She talks about the origins of the account in her interest in Victorian fashion, art, and history, and how the account has been embraced by enthusiasts […]

Matt Poland talks about the meaning of archives, the nature of their construction, the physical environments that archives engender, and their emancipatory possibilities. Besides his own work on the archives of George Eliot, he talks about The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project, The Teaching Archive by Rachel Buurma and Laura Hefferman, Stirrings in the Archives by […]

Eric Wade speaks with Saronik about lust. They discuss how depictions of sexuality in medieval literature have persisted through literary traditions and shaped modern ideas of Orientalism and the sexual other. In the episode, Eric mentions a number of modern theorists, including Edward Said, Joseph Boone, Ghassan Moussawi, and Joseph Massad. Dr. Erik Wade—a visiting […]

Amy Gaeta uses the relationship between humans and technology, non-military use of drones being a prime example, to rethink concepts of passivity and how it can bring about change. She makes an intervention in science and technology studies from her position in feminist and disability studies, drawing from diverse theoretical sources like the work of […]

Nicholas Birns talks about ‘the hyperlocal’, a modality of American journalism in the early 1990s that he adapts to characterize a flexible and transposable concept of the local used in eighteenth and nineteenth century British and American literatures. Nicholas Birns teaches at the Center for Applied Liberal Arts at New York University. He is the […]

Merel Visse and Inge van Nistelrooij talk with Kim about Care Ethics. Over the course of the episode, we discuss works by many care ethicists and other philosophically inclined thinkers. Prominent among these is Joan Tronto, whose book Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (NYU Press, 2013) offers a political approach to the practice of […]