Staying With The Question

In this episode, the hosts chat with Dr. Bailey about his recent book Conceptual Art After Modernism: Reconceiving Art and Art History (2025, Routledge). This book provides a new interpretation of art after 1950 by foregrounding the importance of conceptual thinking as a pervasive force for change in art and art history. Bailey shows how distinctions between art and art history gave way as conceptual thinking provided artists and art historians with a common means to reassess what art could be and do in the world.  Interview by Public Humanities Intern Angela Ulloa.

The hosts chat with Dr. Duncan-O'Neill about her recent book _Art Against Censorship: Honoré Daumier, Comedy, and Resistance in 19th-Century France_ (2024, Manchester University Press). This book explores how the famous caricaturist Honoré Daumier used comedy and art to resist censorship in 19th-century France, even depicting 17th-century theater scenes during periods of political oppression. _Art Against Censorship_ examines Daumier's career, which included imprisonment for a satirical cartoon, and his use of lithography to create direct and spontaneous political commentary, often lampooning the government and bourgeoisie. Interview by OU Public Humanities Intern Rylie Kennon.

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the Arts & Humanities Forum at the University of Oklahoma presents the fourth and final Trandsiciplinary Research Panel exploring "Dirt." This panel is entitled "Dirty Dirt: Thinking with Pollution, Pesticides, Noise, and Gossip." It features the research of OU Faculty Andreea Marculescu (MLLL), Peter Soppelsa (HSTM), Marcela Loría-Salazaar (Meterology), and Paul Feller-Simmons (Music). These panels are designed to gather expertise from across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM. Together our panelists help us consider the many ways in which dirt is used to signal a boundary between the acceptable and unacceptable.

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the Arts & Humanities Forum at the University of Oklahoma presents the third of four Transdisciplinary Research Panels. This panel is entitled "Red Dirt Place-Making: Thinking with Community, Home, and Identity." It features the research of OU Faculty Allyson Shortle (Political Science), Rilla Askew (English), Bryan Bloom (Construction Science), Ken Marold (Architecture), and Kalenda Eaton (African and African American Studies). These panels are designed to gather expertise from across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM. Together, our panelists help us consider the many ways in which Dirt (like the Red Dirt of Oklahoma) is tied to ideas about identity and home. 

The hosts chat with Dr. Alpers about his recent book _Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America (2024, Rutgers University Press).  The 1970's are frequently seen as a watershed period, an era from which sources of 21st-century American culture began to flow. But the 1970's are also seen as a particularly backward-looking time, seen by many critics as morbidly nostalgic for times before the wrenching changes that were associated with the 1960's. _Happy Days_ explores the relationship of the 1970's American culture to the pre-Sixties past through four case studies. Far from mere nostalgia, Americans' diverse reimaginings of the past were a significant part of what made the 1970's so culturally foundational for the decades to come. Interview by Public Humanities Intern Silma Nurfadhilah.

The hosts chat with Dr. Condren about his recent book An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (2024, Cornell University Press).  Eisenstein directed some of the twentieth century's most important films, from the early classic of montage, Battleship Potemkin, to his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible. Alongside these, however, the Soviet filmmaker also toiled over a compelling array of unrealized projects, from ideas that never grew beyond complex, passionate notebook scrawls and sketches to productions that were mounted and shot to some degree of completion without ever being finished. Working from the archival remnants of several of the director's most fascinating unrealized projects, Dr. Condren's book reveals new aspects of Eisenstein's genius, showing the filmmaker in a constant state of process, open to working toward impossible and sometimes utopian ends, and committed to the pursuit of creative and theoretical discovery. Interview by Public Humanities intern Logan Pizzeck.

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the Arts & Humanities Forum at the University of Oklahoma presents the second of four Transdisciplinary Research Panels. This panel is entitled "What Dirt is Not: Thinking with Loess, Shell, Sand, and Dust." It features the research of OU faculty Tamar Zinguer (Architecture), Lynn Soreghan (Geosciences), Asa Randall (Anthropology), and Oklahoma State University Oral Historian Mary Larson. These panels are designed to gather expertise from across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM. Together, our panelists help us consider the many ways in which we understand dirt in contrast to other particulate matter.

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the OU Arts & Humanities Forum presents the first of four Transdisciplinary Research Panels. This panel is entitled "Dirt as Soil: Thinking with Germination, Cultivation, Plant Life and Carbon Capture." It features the research of OU Faculty Cathleen Faubert (School of Visual Arts),Annabel Ipsen (Sociology), Caitlin Hodges (Geosciences), and Geoffrey Goble (Religious Studies). These panels are designed to gather expertise from across the arts, humanities, social sciences and STEM. Together, our panelists help us consider the many ways in which dirt (or more precisely soil) is generative for plant life, agriculture, and beyond.

The hosts chat with Dr. Grinberg about her recent book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (2024, Princeton University Press). This book follows an influential group of critics and writers in the post-WWII period who forged a pugilistic writing style as distinctively American, Jewish, and masculine. Profiling important figures like Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe, Grinberg describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel American Jews from outsiders to insiders and normalize a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood. Interview by Forum Public Humanities Intern Mack Krebs.

The hosts chat with Dr. Sturtevant about her recent book It's All in the Delivery:
Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (2024, University of Texas Press). This book examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around nonmarital pregnancy in the 1960s and 70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks, infertility, adoption, and abortion from the 1980s to now. Interview by Forum Public Humanities Intern Kaylyn Brandt.