Reframing History

In this episode, I speak with Amy Derogatis from the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. She is a professor of religion and American culture and served as the Faculty Excellence Advocate for the College of Arts and Letters. Her most recent book Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2015). Her commentary on religion and culture has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon.com. DeRogatis joined me to discuss the American Religious Sounds Project, a collaborative digital initiative, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, that seeks to document and interpret the diversity of American religious life by attending to its varied sonic cultures.

In this episode, I spoke with Robert K. Nelson, the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. Nelson has been at the forefront of some of the most dynamic projects linked to digital humanities in the public sphere. The DSL has developed multiple visualization projects under the umbrella of the American Panorama (AP) project. AP is described as “a historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century” and combines in-depth research with interactive mapping techniques. The maps on AP present data-rich visualizations that explore questions around redlining, migration, and electoral politics. As a result, the DSL has become a point of entry for digital humanities for many people.

In this episode I spoke with Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Dr. Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming that role in 2017, she served as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication for the Modern Language Association. In addition, she was managing editor for PMLA and other MLA publications. Her most recent book, Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good was published in 2019. She is also project director for Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 10,000 scholars and practitioners in the humanities. In our discussion, Dr. Fitzpatrick outlined why public humanities matter and we discuss how digital praxis can help academic engage with the public.

In this bonus episode I’m speaking to Dr. Tina Bucuvalas, the former director of Florida Folklife Program & State Folklorist from 1996 to 2009. Dr. Bucuvalas worked with communities across the state and developed a number of public programs to spotlight Florida’s rich cultural heritage. Her work in Eatonville, FL is noteworthy as she helped make the case for the town addition to the National Register of Historic Places.

In this week’s episode, Scot French (University of Central Florida) and Julian C. Chambliss (Michigan State University) discuss the critical role of memory in shaping perception of community history.

In this week’s episode I spoke with Rachel H. Simmons, the archivist for the Winter Park Public Library (https://www.wppl.org/). Working with the community to craft a more holistic narrative that weaves the collective experience together relies on the support of archivist. In thinking about the project that inspires this podcast, we recognize it as public scholarship to enhance civic discourse. Public Scholarship is defined by Imagining America (https://imaginingamerica.org/). IA help to define public scholarship as projects that promote mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sphere. Under that framework community institutions like the local library and academic institutions (Rollins College [https://www.rollins.edu/history/] and the University of Central Florida [http://history.cah.ucf.edu/]) can do much to bridge the gap between knowledge creation and community engagement.

In this conversation, Ms. Simmons talks about h

A Conversation with Diedre Faith Houchen about Black Education and Liberation

In this week’s episode, we delve deeper into the black social world by examining a liberatory tradition in education. Historically, achieving education and economic stability were priorities for African Americans after the Civil War. The effort to achieve access to education is one defining aspect of the collective activism we see in black communities since Reconstruction. Those struggles continue, but to learn more about the legacy of education activism I spoke with Diedre Houchen, a postdoctoral associate for the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations in the Levin School of Law ( https://www.law.ufl.edu/areas-of-study/centers/csrrr) at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Houchen's work exploring black teacher activism in the early 20th century sheds light on the hidden network of black educators that shaped the civil right narrative in Florida.

About Diedre Faith Houchen, Ph.D.

Diedre F.

This week I spoke with Walter D. Greason. Walter is the Dean of the Honors School and an historian in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. His recent works include Planning Future Cities (a co-edited collection on urban development with Anthony Pratcher II), Cities Imagined (a co-edited collection on the Africa Diaspora in media and culture with Julian C. Chambliss), and Industrial Education (a co-edited collection on race and industrialization with David Goldberg). Greason’s groundbreaking cultural history, Suburban Erasure, won the prize for Best Non-Fiction about New Jersey in 2014. He also serves as the Treasurer for the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). A life member of the African American Intellectual History Society, Dr. Greason’s #RacialViolenceSyllabus reached millions of readers after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, contributing to an ongoing public debate