Reverb Effect

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the long history of conservative student activism on American college campuses. The popular image of the 1960s student is a protester against the Vietnam War or for civil rights. That same decade also saw the rise of right-wing student groups like Young Americans for Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. We explore how national leaders and donors built these groups, what they called grassroots organizing, and how they copied the tactics of the left. We also follow the students who later became prominent figures in the Republican Party, the courts, and conservative media, and trace the right's century-long fight with higher education up to today's campus culture wars.

Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd is a historian of American colleges and universities and a community scholar affiliate of Indiana University and the Society for US Intellectual History. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Sophie Wunderlich received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of the Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we visit KIN: Us and Our Kinds, an exhibit of paintings, comics, and sculpture by historian and artist Rafael Neis, and ask what happens when creative practice becomes a way of doing history. Drawing on ancient rabbinic stories, KIN explored how kinship, species, and bodies were once imagined as unstable and open to change. We talk with Neis about bringing art and scholarship together, teaching history through hands-on experiments, the medical history of classifying bodies, and how discomfort in front of art can start conversations.

Rafael Neis is Hermann P. & Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Neis is the author of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (University of California Press, 2023). Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we follow the journey of Ugandan cultural artifacts from removal to repatriation, and what happens when they return home. Tracing historical materials and their layered afterlives as they moved from colonial Africa to the Cambridge Museum and back to the Uganda National Museum, we explore how collecting trajectories stripped objects of meaning, and how present-day recovery raises complex questions about belonging and identity.

Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University. Talitha Pam is a PhD candidate in the joint doctoral program in Anthropology and History, and a 2025-26 Graduate Student Research Fellow at the University of Michigan Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

What happens when a neighborhood tells its own story? In this episode of Reverb Effect, we step into Detroit's Woodbridge neighborhood to hear firsthand accounts of resilience, memory, and change – from postwar life and the 1967 uprising to art, activism, and shifting pressures of today.

Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University. Richard Bachmann is a resident of Woodbridge and a PhD candidate in History. Angie Gaabo is a resident of Woodbridge and the former director of the Woodbridge Neighborhood Development nonprofit organization.

Explore more at the Woodbridge Digital Archive.

Nationalism. Emerging technology. Militarization. Destroyed bodies. Total war. In this episode, three historians reconsider the dominant themes of the First World War—which are as relevant today as they were a century ago.

Cheyenne Pettit studies Canadian and British conflicts over the treatment of venereal disease during World War One. Matthew Hershey's research explores meanings and experiences of soldiers' suicide in the First World War. And Lediona Shahollari focuses on the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange during the partition of those two states in the aftermath of the Great War. Join them in a conversation reflecting on the legacy of that conflict.

Archives are central to the work of historians. But they are not just for scholars. In this episode, we talk with an archivist, an archival theorist, and a historian, all working to democratize these spaces, what they hold, and who can access them.

Professor Patricia Garcia will help us think about the archives through a critical lens. Archivist Brian Williams will help us understand how to build an archive essentially from scratch. And Professor Stephen Berrey will help us understand what role the public can play in archival endeavors.

One person, missionary EW McDowell, influenced the fate of Syriac Christians ahead of the US Immigration Act of 1924. In this episode, Hannah Roussel interviews James Wolfe about McDowell, whose writings and testimony before Congress opened up the dialectics about the nature of the category "Asiatic."

Alexander McConnell talks with Olga Medvedkova, a Soviet antiwar activist whose arrest garnered worldwide attention in 1983. In light of the two-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, what can we learn from Medvedkova and the Soviet peace movement?

Join Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1777 as he waits, in an aristocrat's antechamber in Munich, for a conversation that could change his life. What did it mean to wait in the past? Who waited? How did it shape society and culture, and how did it define social interactions?

In this episode, Paige Newhouse interviews Jason Young, co-curator of Hear Me Now: the Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, a traveling exhibit housed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art centering enslaved artisans and the stoneware they produced.