Hopkins Press Podcasts

On this episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, we offer an interview with poet Shane McCrae, conducted by the editor of Literary Imagination, Paul Franz.

The interview kicks off with Shane McCrae reading two poems that are featured in the newest issue of Literary Imagination: "from ‘Last on Earth’"and "His Letter to Everyone After They Have Vanished." It’s an engaging conversation spanning McCrae’s own forthcoming work as well as his recently edited collection of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs, which is also reviewed in this issue of Literary Imagination.

We’ve made McCrae’s poems and Will Brewbaker's review of McCrae's new Berryman volume available to read for free on Project MUSE for the month of September.Visit the podcast website at www.press.jhu.edu/multimedia for links.

Today we feature an interview with Nnamdi Nnake, who is currently a PhD Candidate at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, researching communications technology history in Africa. His new article made the cover of the latest issue of Technology and Culture, an article entitled “Seeing Technical Labor,” which explores photographic archives of the technicians and laborers installing telegraph lines in Nigeria in the early 20th century.

Concurrent with the publication of this article, the McMaster Museum of Art has an exhibition curated by Nnamdi Nnake, called Connected Histories: The Telegraph in Nigeria. This exhibition opened this week and runs through December 1, and I understand that for those of us not lucky enough to be in Hamilton, Ontario this fall, the exhibit includes an online component, so you can view some of the work no matter where you are.

We’ve made Nnamdi Nnake’s article, “Seeing Technical Labor” in the new issue of Technology and Culture available to read for free on Project MUSE through the month of September.

On today’s episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast we have Paul Franz, the editor of our journal Literary Imagination, chatting with Udith Dematagoda, whose new article An Idea without a Future: Joseph Conrad and the Romanticism of the Lost Cause is out now in the newest issue of Literary Imagination.

We have unlocked the paywall for this article through Labor Day, so everyone will be able to read this piece for free at Project MUSE. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/993964

Udith Dematagoda took his PhD in 2016 from the University of Glasgow and is currently an external researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Tokyo. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic, editor of Wyndham Lewis's Left Wings Over Europe (OUP, 2025), and serves on the Editorial Board of Oxford University Press's The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the independent literary publisher Hyperidean Press.

We have a very special episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast today. The new issue of MLN focuses on "Rilke’s Afterlives" and it features all-new translations of six Rilke poems by legendary translator Edward Snow:

Leaving

La Dame á la Licorne (Tapestries in the Hôtel de Cluny)

Requiem for a Friend

Endymion

[ Untitled]

Migliera

These new Snow translations, along with the rest of the MLN special issue on "Rilke's Afterlives", are open access, available to all to read for free via Project MUSE's Subscribe to Open initiative.

Special issue guest editor Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei introduces Edward Snow this very special episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast.

On this episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, we offer a special conversation between Paul Franz, the editor of Literary Imagination, and Carol Muske-Dukes, a celebrated poet, novelist, and educator whose new article for Literary Imagination explores the poetry of Larry Levis, and the purposes and pitfalls of publishing a poet posthumously.

Muske-Dukes is the former Poet Laureate of California and a Guggenheim Fellow, and she recently retired as a professor at University of Southern California, where she founded the Literature & Creative Writing graduate program. Among her many achievements, Muske-Dukes is the author of sixteen books, including poetry, novels, and essay collections. Her most recent book of poetry, Blue Rose, was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize short-list finalist.

Carol Muske-Dukes’ new article, Fifth Season: Editing Larry Levis, appears in the most recent issue of Literary Imagination, and we’ve made her article available free to all to read via Project MUSE through the end of August.

The most recent issue of our journal Social Research focuses on the concept of “Gaslighting,” a term that has gained a great deal of popularity in recent years that has its roots in classic cinema and theatre, most famously in the 1944 film Gaslight, for which Ingrid Bergman was awarded a best actress Oscar. 

The articles in this special issue look at gaslighting in myriad contexts, from film and domestic violence to international politics and the judiciary.

For this episode, we speak with two authors from the issue: sociologist Paige Sweet, who is looking at Gaslighting in Intimate Relationships, and Nora Gilbert, who co-specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and twentieth-century American film — an ideal platform from which she investigates an underexplored subgenre of films that arose in Gaslight’s immediate wake which she calls gaslight noir.

Of course, fans of the Hopkins Press Journals may recognize Nora Gilbert’s name as the long-time editor of another one of our titles, Studies in the Novel.

Both of the interviewees articles will be free to read in Social Research on Project MUSE through 31 August 2026.

On today’s episode we have an interview with Elizabeth Szkirpan, Collections and Discovery Specialist at Harvard Business School's Baker Library, who is in conversation with Katie O'Hara-Krebs, social media manager for our journal portal: Libraries and the Academy.

Elizabeth Szkirpan's new article for portal is entitled "Library Services Contributing to Institutional Success at R1 Universities: An Exploratory Mixed-Source Quantitative Model." Her article, which is available open access through Project MUSE, takes a look at how academic libraries are challenged in justifying their value in the current business-oriented higher education environment, particularly as non-revenue generating units with increasing costs, and how academic libraries can develop metrics to translate library service into key institutional performance indicators.

This article, along with rest of this issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy is open access, available to read for free, thanks to the Project MUSE Subscribe to Open initiative.

Elizabeth Szkirpan is a library and information studies professional with a research focus on the history of library technical services and business-adjacent practices for academic libraries. She currently works at Harvard Business School's Baker Library, where she assists with collection development and electronic resources licensing.

Today on the podcast, we talk with Richard Gabri about his new article for ELH, “All White in the End: From the Passage of James Wait to the Passing of James Gatz; Intertextuality and the Riddle of Race in The Great Gatsby.” 

Building on the work of Carlyle Van Thompson, whose 2004 book The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination explored the ways that Jay Gatsby can be read as a white-passing Black man, Gabri and his high school students began a literary exploration of the classic novel, and discovered fascinating intertextual links between Fitzgerald's titular character to James Wait, the protagonist of Joseph Conrad's controversial novella known as The Children of the Sea.  Gabri links Gatsby’s racial passing to Fitzgerald’s rewriting of Conrad’s James Wait, a Black imposter whose presence aboard the ship "Narcissus" produces projection, suspicion, and moral crisis.

In pre-press, the article has already garnered a great deal of attention, with over 8000 downloads. In 2024, Gabri and his students traveled to the American Literature Association conference in Chicago, where they presented their findings — becoming perhaps the first high school students to present at ALA. Last year, as The Great Gatsby celebrated its 100th anniversary, the research received mainstream press attention, including an article from Bay Area PBS affiliate KQED. 

“All White in the End: From the Passage of James Wait to the Passing of James Gatz; Intertextuality and the Riddle of Race in The Great Gatsby” is slated to publish in the summer 2026 issue of ELH, and will be available #OpenAccess at Project MUSE.

Richard Gabri teaches high school English at Bentley School in Lafayette, California, and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University.

Today on the podcast, we talk with education scholars Gina Ann Garcia and Demetri L. Morgan about their recent article for Review of Higher Education, entitled “Mission-Based vs. Enrollment-Based Institutions: Segmented Governance at a Catholic Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI)”

This article explores the role of governing boards of Hispanic Serving Institutions in advancing “servingness” — in other words, the embodiment of an identity for serving Latines, and the authors study this through the lens of the ways trustees at one Catholic Hispanic Serving Institution make sense of their organization’s identity. Garcia and Morgan conclude with their recommendation that HSIs trustees must understand their institutions as unique, and that governing boards have a distinct role in influencing “servingness.”

The Review of Higher Education is one of our #S2O #OpenAccess journals, so this article, along with all of the issues from this volume year of the Review of Higher Education is free for everyone to read at Project MUSE.

Today on the podcast, we meet Alex Brostoff and rl Goldberg, the guest editors of the special issue of College Literature on trans literatures.

Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, and rl Goldberg is currently Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College. Independently, Brostoff and Goldberg have done a lot of interesting and innovative work on literature, transness, queerness, and auto theory, and together they’ve joined forces not just to edit this issue of College Literature, but also a forthcoming book from Fordham Press, titled Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical.

This issue of College Literature offers a variety of exciting pieces, including Stephanie Burt on Philip Larkin, Sarah Snyder and Will Anderson on Incarcerated Trans Resistance, and Cameron Awkward-Rich on Red Jordan Arobateau. The issue also includes must-read interviews with Jordy Rosenberg, Trish Salah, torrin a. greathouse, gaita nihil, Cole Rizki — and there’s so much more. We’re making this whole issue free to read on Project MUSE through May 15, so go forth and read while you listen!