AS A LITTLE FESTIVE TREAT...we're joined by Slavoj Žižek himself!! Or is it Liz Truss? Either way, the brains behind the anonymous Twitter account A Very Theory Xmas chats to us about the postcolonial melancholia of Lynx Africa and a primary school nativity narrated by Derrida. Continental philosophy with a Christmas Twist.

Remember to follow @AVeryTheoryXmas on Twitter

Dear Lord, what a sad little obsession we have with a retro episode of Come Dine with Me...this episode we're joined by the hopeless Professor Richard Hall. We're here to radicalise your pedagogy and diversify your curriculum with the help of a straight white man.

You can find Richard's research here: http://www.richard-hall.org/ and get his new book The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History for FREE here: http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=305

We're back! This week we're speaking with Professor Erica Fudge and Dr Elsa Richardson about all things Fleshy History. Erica and Elsa are based at the University of Strathclyde where they currently co-teach a course all about vegetarian culture and eating animals. Erica's work emerges at the intersection of Renaissance Studies and Animal Studies while Elsa is a New Generation Thinker and currently holds a Chancellor's Fellowship in Health and Wellbeing. In this episode we find out what bladder control and pissing dogs have to do with the Enlightenment, why a woman giving birth to a cat was pretty common for the Renaissance, and how horrendously itchy the C19th was. We also consider if cows are the sharks of the land, what the Victorians thought about Birkenstocks and queer vegetarianism.

You can find out more about Erica's work by following the British Animal Studies Network @BASN and find out more about Elsa's work here @elsacrichardson

We're back! This week we're speaking with self-proclaimed 'sweary Prof', Dr Tracey Hill. Tracey is currently professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Bath Spa University. In this episode we find out why the emblem of Envy always had her tits out while eating a human heart, why Early Modern pageants were a major fire hazard, and what on earth a whiffler is. We also learn about the role of rhinos in civic pageantry, what hippos have to do with anything (they don't), and why the Lord Mayor's show is considered to be an 'acoustic assault'.

You can find out about Tracey's big AHRC project here: https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/projects/civic-london/ and follow her on Twitter @TraceLarkhall

We're back! This week it's all gay frogs, rainbow-shitting unicorns, and glitter bombing with Dr Nicole Seymour, ASSOCIATE professor of English at California State University. In this episode we find out about the funny side of climate change and coin a new term: ecoLOLogy. We chat about the power of irony in addressing the darkest timeline, and learn about queer ecologies and whether or not it's fair to describe glitter as the STD of the craft world. We also discuss the ethics of laughing WITH vegans not AT them, and think about why fascist environmentalism is so hot right now. She is the author of TWO monographs, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and is currently working a new text for the Bloomsbury 'Object Lesson' series on, you guessed it, GLITTER. Fabulous.

You can follow Nicole @nseymourPHD

This week we're speaking with Dr Andy Kesson, Box Office Bear and Reader in Early Modern Studies at Roehampton University. In this episode we find out how bears caused traffic jams in the Tudor period, and what the questionable sitcom, Will and Grace, has to do with Shakespeare's sonnets. Did you know that during the Early Modern period statistically there were more people who were not William Shakespeare than people who were? We learn that women were actually pretty important in Early Modern theatre, second only to Rhubarb salesmen. We also talk about GAY PANIC in the era and why Twelfth Night can get tae fuck.

You can check out Andy's project 'A Bit Lit here @a_bit_lit, and find out more about other NON-Shakespearean early modern authors here @b4shakes. For more bear content give him a follow @andykesson

We've CRACKed America! In this episode we speak with Dr Travis Chi Wing Lau, queer, crip, cat-dad and current Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College, Ohio. In this week's episode we find out why anti-vaccination sentiment is just one more thing we can blame Victorians for, which COVID-19 vaccine is the most queer, and whether or not our constant chat about our vaginas can officially be classified as Medical Humanities. We also talk about the private and public discourses of chronic pain and consider what the heck is going on with Super-crip discourses and the 'narrative prosthesis' of disabled characters.

You can follow Travis on Twitter @travisclau, or thirst over his very professional cardigan-wearing headshot here: https://travisclau.com/ For anyone looking for more crip-poetic content look no further than his most recent poetry collection Paring, available here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/paring-by-travis-chi-wing-lau/

We don't know if you've noticed, but stats = STEM and STEM = FUNDING. This episode we're trying to cheat our way into 'science' via sociolinguistics. Guided by Dr Sadie Ryan of the AWARD-WINNING podcast Accentricity, we're here to chat accents, prejudice, Buffy, and GRAPHS. I guess we're legit now?!

You can follow Sadie @Sadie_d_ryan and her various podcasts at @accentricitypod or @sadie_and_osh for Buffy.

As per, LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW @LOLMyPraxis

Our guest this week is Mollie Clarke, webmistress of the Third Sex Reading Group and current PhD student at the University of Roehampton. Mollie is currently working on her thesis titled 'Female Cross-Dressing, Genre, and Popular Literary Forms from 1830-1900'. In this episode we discuss why we always think of the Victorians as tightlaced, prudish, asexual beings when in fact they were hella kinky. We learn all about the salacious secret life of George Augustus Sala who when he wasn't publishing essays, articles and popular fiction was getting kinky with whips and corsets. We also debate the merits of the nip slip as praxis, why cross-dressing is better than crossfit. We also learn a lot about a show girl named Lola.

If you fancy a queer geek out with Mollie and her menagerie of popular fiction porno lovers then you can join the Third Sex Reading Group here: https://victorianpopularfiction.org/third-sex-reading-group/ follow them on twitter here @VPFA1 and follow Mollie here @molclarke

What do you get when you combine Elon Musk, Bumble, cumrockets, and AI? Presenting the ultimate B-movie for our times: FASCISTS IN SPACE. Oxford DPhil candidate, Chelsea Haith joins us to discuss speculative fiction, the sounds of contagion, and whether we could (or should) programme a robot to love. Chelsea is PI of the Futures Thinking Network and is works on the Sound of Contagion project (soundofcontagion.com) in addition to a million other things - she is a machine. Quite literally.

You can find Chelsea on Twitter @chelsea_haith or on her website: chelseahaith.com