Staying With The Question

In celebration of the Forum Annual 2023-24 Theme "Visible," the OU Arts & Humanities Forum welcomed Dr. Catherine Clark (MIT) for a Marquee Lecture in the "Paris Visible" Distinguished Lecture Series. This lecture reflects on Catherine Clark’s longstanding engagement with the photographic history of Paris. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the municipality invested heavily in creating and making accessible large collections of photographs in the hopes that they would serve the needs of future scholars. How have these efforts shaped history as it has been written since? In other words, do photographs make the past visible and, if so, how? The talk will draw on Clark’s research on the history of photographic history and street photography in the French capital as well as her forays into the utility of Artificial Intelligence for rendering the past not just visible but legible. You can find out more about Dr. Clark's work at https://history.mit.edu/people/catherine-clark/ 

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Historian Jennifer J. Davis about her new book Bad Subjects: Libertine Lives in the French Atlantic 1619-1814 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). In this book that spans continents, Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to play out potential revolutions. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behaviors, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest. The research in Bad Subjects provides a framework for analysis of libertinage as a set of anti-authoritarian practices and discourses that circulated among the peoples of France and the Atlantic World, ultimately providing a compelling blueprint for alternative social and economic order in the Revolutionary period. 

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Professor of Musicology Jennifer Saltzstein about her new book Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this book, Saltzstein offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. Saltzstein argues that trouvère songs influenced the ways particular groups of medieval people saw themselves through the lens of their environment, creating durable landscape-based identities that persisted even when the environment itself changed. This durable connection between identity and landscape has compelling implications for our own time. 

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Japanese Professor Joshua Frydman about his new book The Japanese Myths: A Guide to Gods, Heroes and Spirits. This book is a smart and succinct guide to the rich tradition of Japanese mythology, from the earliest recorded legends of Izanagi and Izanami, their divine offspring and the creation of Japan, to medieval tales of vengeful ghosts, through to the modern-day reincarnation of ancient deities as the heroes of Mecca anime. Join us for an irreverent and wide-ranging discussion about the Japanese myths from the ancient to the present day! As a bonus, get a preview of Dr. Frydman's other new book Inscribed Objects and the Development of Literature in Early Japan. 

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU English Professor Joseph Mansky about his new book Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This book traces the practice of libel across law, literature, and culture, outlining a viral and often virulent media ecosystem. It shows that our present-day preoccupation with free speech and fake news has a long literary history. Like social media today, libels gave ordinary people a public platform to criticize the ruling classes. But also like social media, the discourse they disseminated was often vicious and vitriolic, a volatile cocktail of rumors, threats, and populist grievance. Debate and defamation, free speech and fake news, went hand in hand. This paradox runs through the representations of libel on the early modern stage, and their plays chart a late Elizabethan public sphere animated by forces that remain uncannily familiar: partisanship and populism, misinformation and sectarian strife, proto-celebrity and political demagoguery.

Host Kim Marshall talks to OU Philosopher Dr. Sherri Irvin about her new book Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art.  Contemporary art can appear to be a space unencumbered by rules, where paintings can be hung upside down, instructions to hum are considered art, piles of candy invite you to eat one, and bananas rot on the floor of a museum. However, as Dr. Irvin discusses in this episode, making rules is a key part of what many contemporary artists do. In contemporary art, she argues, rules are now an artistic medium, and they help to activate the expressive potential of material objects.

For transcripts and show notes, see our website.

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Musicologist Dr. Michael Lee about his recently published book Music in the Horror Films of Val Lewton. Written in an accessible and engaging voice, this book offers a fascinating look at the role of the RKO Studio’s Music Department in contributing to the revolutionary horror films of director Val Lewton between 1942 and 1946. In an era of big monster movies, Lewton’s films brought subtleness to the horror genre, emphasizing the terror of the shadows and the unseen. Lee calls attention to the role of music in this contribution, from the first “jump scare” to rich orchestral scores that highlighted the tortured inner state of main characters.

For transcripts and show notes, see our website. 

Host Kim Marshall interviews award-winning American novelist and short story  Oklahoma author Rilla Askew (associate professor of English at OU) about her new novel Prize for the Fire, the harrowing tale of Early Modern Reformist and writer Anne Askew, who was burned as a heretic in 1546.

Order is all around us, like air. Before we are even aware of our surroundings, we have entered a humanly-ordered world. Order can be used to punish creativity and keep people in their place. But it is also order that guarantees the rule of law, a fair shot, and democratic governance. Host Kim Marshall talks to OU scholars Sherri Irvin, Jermaine Thibodaux, Katie Schumaker,and Wanda Katja Liebermann about the ways that order helps us make sense of the world around us. Throughout time and across the globe, how have we have made humanly-ordered worlds meaningful? 

Can we train our senses to listen better, observe more closely, and savor the world around us? In this episode, host Kim Marshall talks to OU Faculty Roxanne Lyst, Jennifer Saltzstein, Konstantinos Karathanasis, and Marwin Begay from the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts. In this discussion covering modern dance, medieval love songs, electro-accoustic composition, and Indigenous printmaking we explore the ways that the arts help us to expand our palate of the senses; to create, contemplate and communicate the fundamental meanings of human existence.