OMNIA Podcast

The coronavirus pandemic does not exist in a vacuum. We look at other urgent issues of our time, and examine how they affect and are affected by COVID-19.

We start this episode—as most things seem to now—with the partisan polarization in the U.S., asking a political science professor if people really are seeing everything in red or blue. Then a historian and legal scholar tells how we got to this state of racial injustice, decades after the Civil Rights movement. Finally, the German professor leading Penn’s environmental humanities program describes life in the climate crisis and the vision she gets from her students of going beyond a "new normal."

Guests:

Matthew Levendusky, Professor of Political Science and Penny and Robert A. Fox Director of the Fels Institute of Government

Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History and Africana Studies

Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Founding Director, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities

***

Produced by Susan Ahlborn  

Narrated by Alex Schein

Edited by Alex Schein and Brooke Sietinsons


Interviews by Susan Ahlborn, Blake Cole, and Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Theme music by Nicholas Escobar, C'18  

Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions


Illustration by Nick Matej


Logo by Drew Nealis

In These Times is a production of Penn Arts & Sciences. Visit our series website to learn more and listen to the first season of In These Times. 

Visit our editorial magazine, Omnia, for more content from Penn Arts & Sciences faculty, students, and alumni. 

Follow Penn Arts & Sciences on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. 

Details from the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 or the quarantines during the bubonic plague sound familiar today. In our second episode, we talk to historians about how past societies dealt with disease, and what happened when a new understanding of germs revolutionized our approach but led us to overlook the larger picture of health. A legal historian explains why the U.S. pandemic repose was state-centered. And an English professor looks at the AIDS epidemic, and reflects on the human right to mourn.

Guests:

David Barnes, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science

Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History

Alexander Chase-Levenson, Assistant Professor of History

Dagmawi Woubshet, Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English

***

Produced by Susan Ahlborn

Narrated and edited by Alex Schein

Interviews by Susan Ahlborn and Jane Carroll

Theme music by Nicholas Escobar, C'18

Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions

Illustration by Nick Matej

Logo by Drew Nealis

In These Times is a production of Penn Arts & Sciences. Visit our series website to learn more and listen to the first season of In These Times. 

Visit our editorial magazine, Omnia, for more content from Penn Arts & Sciences faculty, students, and alumni. 

Follow Penn Arts & Sciences on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. 

“In these times” has been a handy turn of phrase in 2020, with varying adjectives used to modify it. Challenging. Unique. Strange. What started as a useful shorthand for the COVID-19 pandemic and the surreal nature of stay-at-home orders became used describe world-wide protests and calls for racial justice. This fall, the OMNIA podcast goes beyond the shorthand, using COVID-19 as a platform for a six-episode series that explores the science, social science, and history that has shaped events in 2020.

To kick things off, we talk to a biologist about contagion. We’ll get insight on mutations, tracking COVID-19’s spread, and protection from antibodies and vaccines. But COVID-19 is more than the disease itself, so we drop in on a conversation between sociologists about health inequality. They’re not surprised that Black, brown, and low-income communities are being affected by COVID-19 at higher rates, but they are concerned about the still-unknown long-term effects on physical and mental health. And finally, a philosopher of science gets real on what high school science gets wrong and why that matters.

Guests:

David Roos, E. Otis Kendall Professor of Biology

Courtney Boen, Assistant­ Professor of Sociology and Axilrod Faculty Fellow

Regina Baker, Assistant­ Professor of Sociology

Michael Weisberg, Professor and Chair of Philosophy

***

Produced by Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Narrated and edited by Alex Schein

Interviews by Jane Carroll, Blake Cole, and Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Theme music by Nicholas Escobar, C'18

Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions

Illustration by Nick Matej

Logo by Drew Nealis

In These Times is a production of Penn Arts & Sciences. Visit our series website to learn more and listen to the first season of In These Times. 

Visit our editorial magazine, Omnia, for more content from Penn Arts & Sciences faculty, students, and alumni. 

Follow Penn Arts & Sciences on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. 

In this episode of the OMNIA Podcast, we recap the 60-Second lectures from the spring of 2019 and highlight two favorites from our archive. You’ll learn about race in the USA from a philosophical perspective, the psychology of why we quit, why truth matters to democracy, and new pedagogies for teaching in the age of climate change.

Our dip into the archives features the 2016 60-Second SLAM winning talk, "The Other Opioid Crisis: How We Learned to Ignore Untreated Pain in Poor Countries," by then History and Sociology of Science Ph.D. candidate Luke Messac, and a 2006 talk, "Beyond the Founding Fathers," by Kathy Peiss, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History.

Many thanks to our spring 2019 lecturers: Quayshawn Spencer, Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy; Joseph Kable, Baird Term Professor of Psychology and Associate Director of MindCORE; Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History; and Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and her students, Tathagat Bhatia and Lucy Corlett from Penn and Claire Hampton from Bryn Mawr.

Since 2003, the 60-Second Lecture Series has challenged Arts and Sciences faculty to distill a wealth of knowledge into a one-minute talk.

Every Wednesday in September and April sees Penn Arts and Sciences faculty members standing at a podium on College Green and lecturing on topics ranging from human history to fractions to fly fishing—all in under a minute.

To view the complete archive of 60-Second Lectures featuring faculty, students, and alumni, visit the Penn Arts and Sciences Vimeo library: vimeo.com/channels/60seclec

Produced by Penn Arts and Sciences

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast by Penn Arts & Sciences on iTunes (https://apple.co/2XVWCbC) and Stitcher (http://bit.ly/2Lf2G9h)

In this episode, we talk to Charles Bernstein, inventive poet, writer of libretti, translator, archivist, and, since 2003, a member of Penn's faculty. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature and co-director of PennSound. He retired from the Department of English at the end of the spring 2019 semester.

In 2019, Bernstein was awarded the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry awarded by Yale University. The Bollingen Prize is awarded biennially by the Yale University Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry.

Produced by Penn Arts & Sciences

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast by Penn Arts & Sciences on iTunes (apple.co/2XVWCbC) and Stitcher (bit.ly/2Lf2G9h)

Quayshawn Spencer asks a simple question about race with a not-so-simple answer: what kind of thing is it? Spencer, the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn, poses the question to undergraduates in his Philosophy of Race course. As a specialist in the philosophies of science, biology, and race, his course examines the very nature and reality of race, beginning with early theories put out by European thinkers including Francois Bernier and Immanuel Kant. Kant’s 18th century essay, “Of the Different Human Races,” provided a scientific definition of race that would influence a long tradition of scholars using science to reinforce negative racial stereotypes—a tradition that Spencer’s course investigates alongside more contemporary philosophical, social, and political questions about race and racism.

Produced by Penn Arts and Sciences

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast by Penn Arts & Sciences on iTunes (apple.co/2XVWCbC) and Stitcher (bit.ly/2Lf2G9h)

In our new series, OMNIA 101, we talk to faculty members about integral aspects of their research, shedding light on their biggest challenges and their strategies for conquering them.

Mark Trodden, Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, and Masao Sako, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Department Chair, have different approaches to exploring two of the greatest mysteries in their field: dark matter and dark energy.

Trodden, a theoretical physicist, devises mathematical models in an effort to explain the cosmic data that observational astronomers like Sako obtain using telescopes and other tools. In this episode of the OMNIA podcast, we asked both of them to help us understand dark matter and dark energy.

Produced by Penn Arts and Sciences

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast by Penn Arts & Sciences on iTunes (apple.co/2XVWCbC) and Stitcher (bit.ly/2Lf2G9h)

Since 2003, the 60-Second Lecture Series has challenged Arts and Sciences faculty to distill a wealth of knowledge into a one-minute talk.

Every Wednesday in September and April sees Penn Arts and Sciences faculty members standing at a podium on College Green and lecturing on topics ranging from human history, to fractions, to fly fishing—all in under a minute.

The latest OMNIA podcast recaps the fall 2018 lectures and highlights two old favorites. In this episode, you’ll learn about greening vacant lots and what that means for crime rates, little-known medieval words that accurately describe the 2018 midterm elections, interpreting the Constitution, the very nature of time, and the evolving cultural and political questions raised ever-improving technologies of speech recognition and information retrieval.

Our dip into the archives features a 2009 talk titled “Why Achievement Isn’t Normal,” given by Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, 2013 MacArthur Fellow, and New York Times best-selling author of Grit, and a 2015 lecture, “What Video Games Have Taught Me About Shakespeare,” by Rebecca Bushnell, School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English, and former Dean of Penn Arts and Sciences.

Many thanks to our fall 2018 lecturers:

John MacDonald, Professor of Criminology and Sociology and the Penny and Robert A. Fox Faculty Director at the Fels Institute of Government

Emily Steiner, Professor of English, and Aylin Malcolm, Ph.D. student in English

Samuel Freeman, the Avalon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Law

Jamal Elias, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and South Asia Studies

Mark Liberman, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics.

To view the complete archive of 60-Second Lectures featuring faculty, students, and alumni, visit the Penn Arts and Sciences Vimeo library: https://vimeo.com/channels/60seclec

Produced by Penn Arts and Sciences

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast by Penn Arts & Sciences on iTunes (apple.co/2XVWCbC) and Stitcher (bit.ly/2Lf2G9h)

In this episode, we explore a potential watershed moment in American politics: the unprecedented number of women running for office in 2018. Dawn Teele, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor of Political Science, researches women and politics, voting rights reform, and candidate recruitment. Right now, she’s studying Emerge, the largest Democratic campaign training program in the United States. The program recruits, trains, and connects Democratic women who want to run for office.

We speak with Teele about the historical underrepresentation of women in politics and discuss some of the cultural narratives and structural factors—from fundraising trends to division of household labor—that potentially impact the success of female candidates in U.S. elections.

Produced by Penn Arts & Sciences

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast by Penn Arts & Sciences on iTunes (apple.co/2XVWCbC) and Stitcher (bit.ly/2Lf2G9h)

In December 2017, The New York Times revealed the existence of a Pentagon program investigating unidentified flying objects. For many people, the continued existence of such a program on UFOs came as a surprise, though the military has historically been known to conduct such studies. Most notably, the Air Force’s Project Blue Book investigated more than 12,000 claimed UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969.

Kate Dorsch, a doctoral candidate in the department of History and Sociology of Science, has been researching UFO encounters reported in Project Blue Book. Her dissertation covers the first “flying saucer” report in 1947 through the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and investigates the creation of scientific knowledge and how this knowledge is communicated to the public.

Produced by Penn Arts and Sciences

Subscribe to the OMNIA Podcast on iTunes: apple.co/29rg0EZ