Hopkins Press Podcasts

On today's episode, we talk with David Shiffman, author of Why Sharks Matter, about his recent study of how scientists are engaging social media: “Scientists No Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky." In this episode, we explore the findings of the survey and discuss some of the reasons why this shift has occurred.

A marine conservation biologist and public science engagement specialist based in Washington, DC, David Shiffman is a prolific writer, with words appearing in National Geographic, the Washington Post, Scientific American, SCUBA magazine, his blog Southern Fried Science, and, of course, his 2022 Hopkins Press book, Why Sharks Matter. Follow him on the social media platform of your choice: @WhySharksMatter

On today's episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, we talk with Lisa Anderson about here new article in Social Research, “From Pursuing Truth to Managing Stress: The Costs and Consequences of the Therapeutic Turn in American Universities.” This is part of a phenomenal and timely special issue of Social Research devoted to exploring “The Embattled University.”

Listeners will be able to read this article for free on Project MUSE through the end of September 2025.

Dr. Anderson is Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita and Dean Emerita at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She also served as provost and president of the American University in Cairo in 2008–2016.

Today we talking with Sarah M. Misemer, a professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M. She has a new article out in South Central Review’s "Worlds In Crisis" special issue, which is called “What a Bawd from the Renaissance Can Teach Us about AI: Celestina, Robots, and Free Will," Dr. Misemer's article takes a look back at a piece of bawdy Spanish Renaissance literature, La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, and considers what it has to say about human free will in the age of AI robots.

Today on the Podcast, we have Marissa J. Spear, whose new article in Journal of Women’s History studies “Women, Survival and the Black Panther Party in Baltimore.”

In this article, Marissa J. Spear focuses on the activities of four women — Angie Hatten, Connie Felder, Lula Hudson, and Nkenge Touré — and the ways they transformed, and were transformed by — working with the party.

It’s a story that comes to a head with a three-week-long seige of the Black Panther headquarters by police and FBI. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the history of the Black Panther party, of women’s liberation and the transformation of gender politics, and of the city of Baltimore. The article will be be free to read on Project MUSE through the end of August.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/960906

We are kicking off Season 4 of the pod with David Hollinger, who is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History, emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialties are American intellectual history and American ethnoracial history, and today we’ll talk to him about his new article for Social Research: An International Quarterly, entitled “The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia”

Dr. Hollinger’s new article is part of a new special issue called “The Embattled University,” a stellar issue which also features contributions from Judith Butler, Lisa Anderson, Albena Azamanova, Ahmed Bawa, Supriya Chaudhuri, Nicholas B. Dirks, Len Gutkin, and Jonathan Veitch. It's a highly recommended issue, especially for those with a stake in the future of higher education.

On today’s episode, we’re talking with Barrett Taylor, professor and coordinator of the higher education program at the University of North Texas. He studies the ways in which higher education interfaces with society, investigating topics including state politics and policy, the organization of academic work, and institutional inequality. Outside of his professorship, he is a fellow in the Center for the Defense of Academic freedom, a project housed at the AAUP, funded by the Mellon Foundation and directed by Isaac Kamola.

Together with Kimberly Watts (currently a doctoral candidate at UNT), he is the co-author of a new article in The Review of Higher Education entitled “Tenure Bans: An Exploratory Study of State Legislation Proposing to Eliminate Faculty Tenure, 2012-2022”

This article, as you might guess, surveys ten years of proposed legislation across the United States aiming to restrict tenure in higher education, and offers observations on the underlying motives and meanings behind these legislative efforts, as well as some recommendations for educators and administrators interested in protecting academic freedom.

Koritha Mitchell is is a public intellectual, a professor of English, a literary historian, an award-winning author and cultural critic, and as of last year she is also a member of the Hopkins Press Advisory Board. Her work has already had quite an impact both within the academy as well as in the larger public sphere.

Her article "Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care", which was published in African American Review in 2018, has impacted both the academy and the mainstream. Thousands of readers are still finding the article each year, making it one of our consistently most-read Hopkins Press Journal articles on Project MUSE.

In our recent Hopkins Press Podcast interview, Mitchell defines her groundbreaking concept of "know-your-place aggression" as "a reaction to the success of people who are not supposed to be successful," and the idea has resonated into recent articles about Junot Diaz in Chronicle of Higher Education and Shedeur Sanders in Esquire, and a 2024 interview with Mitchell published in Public Books brought her work to the attention of numerous new readers.

Over the years, Mitchell has been a prolific contributor to several of the journals that call Hopkins Press home, including Callaloo, African American Review, American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

On today's Hopkins Press Podcast, we talk with Kelly Ross (editor of Poe Studies) Elissa Zellinger (guest editor of the forthcoming special issue of Poe Studies), and Eliza Richards, author of Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle. This fall, a new special issue of Poe Studies — due out in Fall 2025 — celebrates 20 years of Eliza Richards' influential book, which has played an important role on the study of 19th century women poets as well as other minoritized poets, print culture, and even Poe himself.

On this episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, we sat down in the library of the Hopkins Press offices with Milan Terlunen, author of an article in the new issue of Book History entitled “What We Can(’t) Know Before We Read: Towards a Theory of the Pre-Reading Environment."

Dr. Terlunen coins this term, "the pre-reading environment" to talk about all the ways we come to know things about a text — a book, a film, etc. — before we read it, if we ever read it. Terlunen's article focuses on newspaper reviews of Agatha Christie's 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Twitter discussions about Hanya Yanagihara's 2016 novel A Little Life, but as you'll learn, pre-reading environments include a broad range of information, from advertising and cover art to spoiler alerts, content warnings, and even film rating systems.

Milan Terlunen is a currently the 2024-25 Tabb Center/AGHI Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins who specializes in public and digital humanities, with a particular emphasis on podcasting. Dr. Terlunen is the co-founder of the Humanities Podcast Network and the host of the How To Read podcast.

This Spring, he is convening a series of podcasting round tables called What Makes Podcasting Accessible?, featuring podcasters across the Hopkins community and beyond. Beginning February 27 and running through April, these round tables will be available to attend both in person and streaming as well. On March 26, Hopkins Press Podcast host Rahne Alexander will be among the guests participating in the What Makes Podcasting Accessible? round table.

On this episode of The Hopkins Press Podcast, we introduce you to Kyla Kupferstein Torres, the new executive editor of Callaloo, the premier journal of literature, art, and culture of the African Diaspora. This year, she took the reins of from the founding editor of Callaloo, Charles H. Rowell, who founded Callaloo in 1976 and cultivated the journal into a vital voice for original work by and about writers and visual artists of African descent worldwide. We talk with Kyla Kupferstein Torres about the legacy of Callaloo and the exciting plans she has for the journal's new era.

To accompany this podcast, we're providing a supplementary reading list, highlighting some of the great pieces Callaloo has published over the years. Read them all at https://www.press.jhu.edu/newsroom/callaloo-reading-list-across-decades