Today’s book is: Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History (University of Illinois Press, 2024), which is an essay collection co-edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene. It explores why in the United States more than three-quarters of the people teaching in colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. This “gig” economy includes lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that can require some faculty to juggle multiple jobs. The included essays draw on a wide range of perspectives, investigate structural changes that have caused the use of contingent faculty to skyrocket, illuminate how precarity shapes day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace, and delve into the ways contingent faculty engage in collective action and other means to resist austerity measures, improve their working conditions, and instigate reforms in higher education. By challenging contingency, this volume issues a call to reclaim higher education’s public purpose.

Our guest is: Dr. Claire Goldstene, who taught as contingent faculty at the University of Maryland, the University of North Florida, and American University. She has published extensively on contingent faculty issues and served on the board of New Faculty Majority Foundation. She is also the author of The Struggle for America's Promise: Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital and is currently working on a book about free speech in the early-twentieth century United States. She is the co-editor of Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education.

Our co-guest is: Maria Maisto, who taught as a contingent faculty member for over fifteen years in Maryland and Ohio. She has published and spoken widely on the topic of contingent faculty equity, advocacy, and coalition building. In 2009, she co-founded New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity, a 501(c)6 membership and advocacy organization, and served as its president. She is a featured essayist in Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also like this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.

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Today’s book is: Is Grad School for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students (U California Press, 2024), by Dr. Yvette Martínez-Vu and Dr. Miroslava Chávez-García. It is the first book to provide first-generation, low-income, and nontraditional students of color with insider knowledge on how to consider and navigate graduate school. Is Grad School for Me? is a calling card and a corrective to the lack of clear guidance for historically excluded students navigating the onerous undertaking of graduate school—starting with asking if grad school is even a good fit. This essential resource offers step-by-step instructions on how to maneuver the admissions process before, during, and after applying. Unlike other guides, Is Grad School for Me? takes an approach that is both culturally relevant and community based. The book is packed with relatable scenarios, memorable tips, common myths and mistakes, sample essays, and templates to engage a variety of learners. With a strong focus on demystifying higher education and revealing the hidden curriculum, this guide aims to diversify a wide range of professions in academia, nonprofits, government, industry, entrepreneurship, and beyond.

Our guest is: Dr. Yvette Martínez-Vu is a grad school and productivity coach and host of the globally top-rated Grad School Femtoring Podcast. She is also the co-editor of the best-selling Chicana M(other)work Anthology and founder of Grad School Femtoring, LLC, where she supports first-gen BIPOC folks in reaching their academic and personal goals. She is the co-author of Is Grad School for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students.

Our co-guest is: Dr. Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently the Faculty Director of the UCSB McNair Scholars Program. She is author of Migrant Longing, States of Delinquency, and Negotiating Conquest. She is the co-author of Is Grad School for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also like the episodes on this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.

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Today’s book is: Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (Red Hen Press, 2023), by David Mas Masumoto. In his new memoir, Mas discovers his “lost” aunt. She had been taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. Due to a disability, she became a “ward” of the state; and his family believed she had died. Then came a surprising phone call—she was alive and living a few miles from their family farm. As Mas discovers, every family has secrets, silences, and lives among their unanswered questions. As Mas learns about his aunt, he asks, How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? The book interrogates how both shame and resilience empowered his family to forge forward in a land that did not want them. Mas shares how he is driven to explore his identity and the meaning of family—especially as farmers tied to the land. In doing so, he uncovers family secrets that bind his family to a sense of history buried in the earth they work and a sense of place that defines them. Secret Harvests is a story of a family separated by racism against Japanese Americans and the discrimination of people with developmental disabilities—reunited seventy years later, returning to their roots on a farm, and bound by family secrets.

Our guest is: David Mas Masumoto is an organic farmer, author, and activist. His book Epitaph for a Peach won the Julia Child Cookbook award and was a finalist for a James Beard award. His writing has been awarded a Commonwealth Club of California silver medal and the Independent Publisher Books bronze medal. He has been honored by Rodale Institute as an "Organic Pioneer." He has served on the boards of the James Irvine Foundation, Public Policy Institute of California, Cal Humanities, and the National Council on the Arts with nomination by President Obama. He farms with his wife Marcy and two adult children, Nikiko and Koro. They reside in a hundred-year-old farmhouse surrounded by their eighty-acre organic peach, nectarine, apricot, and raisin farm outside of Fresno, California.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. You can support the show by downloading episodes and by telling a friend about them, because knowledge should be shared.

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Today’s book is: The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You (Catapult, 2020), by Dina Nayeri, a book which asks “what is it like to be a refugee?” There are more than 25 million refugees in the world today. At age eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother, and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned–refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. She shows us that to be a refugee is to grapple with your place in society, attempting to reconcile the life you have known with a new, unfamiliar home. All this while bearing the burden of gratitude in your host nation: the expectation that you should be forever thankful for the space you have been allowed. Nayeri offers a new understanding of refugee life, confronting dangers from the metaphor of the swarm to the notion of “good” immigrants. She calls attention to the harmful way in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others. The Ungrateful Refugee recalibrates the conversation around the refugee experience, by sharing the real stories of what it is like to be forced to flee your home, and to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.

Our guest is: Professor Dina Nayeri, who is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee, winner of numerous prizes including the Geschwister Scholl Preis, the Kirkus Prize, and Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices. Her essay of the same name was one of The Guardian’s most widely read long reads in 2017, and is taught in schools and anthologized around the world. A 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and Best American Short Stories, among other honors. Her work has been published in 20+ countries and in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Granta, and other publications. She is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. In autumn 2021, she was a Fellow at the American Library in Paris. She recently joined the faculty at the University of St. Andrews.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

• Who Gets Believed?

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. You can support the show by downloading episodes and by telling a friend about them, because knowledge should be shared.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

Are you facing writing roadblocks? There are many guides on how to make your writing match academic standards, so why aren’t there any on how to make yourself actually write? How can you get to PhDone if life keeps getting in the way? Can you get there if you are a care-giver? Facing illness, or work responsibilities? Dealing with anxiety? In the midst of a personal or a global crisis? What practical advice exists to help you get to PhDone in the real world? Scholar and author Dr. Briana Barner joins us to share the practical approaches that worked for her, and that can work for you, in this episode that breaks down what it takes to tackle and finish a big writing project in real life.

Our guest is: Dr. Briana Barner, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. She received a doctorate in Radio-Television-Film and a doctoral portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas. Briana also earned a Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies from UT. She is an interdisciplinary critical and cultural communications scholar with research interests in Black podcasts, digital and Black feminism, digital media, Black cultural production and representation. Her work has been published in journals including Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, and Film Quarterly. She is currently working on a manuscript about the cultural production of Black podcasts.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also like the episodes on this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes, because knowledge is for everyone. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

Today’s book is: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024), by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, a book that asks why stimulating jobs and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible, due to something called habituation. Because of habituation, people get used to dirty air, become unconcerned by their own misconduct, and become more liable to believe misinformation. But what if you could dishabituate? Could you find a way to see everything anew? What if you could regain sensitivity, not only to the great things in your life, but also to the terrible things you stopped noticing and so don’t try to change? 

In Look Again, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to “dishabituate.” This groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, illuminates how we can reignite the sparks of joy, innovate, and recognize where improvements urgently need to be made. The key to this disruption—to seeing, feeling, and noticing again—is change. By temporarily changing your environment, changing the rules, changing the people you interact with—or even just stepping back and imagining change—you regain sensitivity, allowing you to more clearly identify the bad and more deeply appreciate the good.

Our guest is: Cass R. Sunstein, who is the nation’s most-cited legal scholar. For the past fifteen years, he has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since that time, he has served in the US government in multiple capacities and worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, where he chaired the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. His book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. He lives in Boston and Washington, DC, with his wife, children, and labrador retrievers. He is the co-author [along with Tali Sharot, who could not join us for this episode] of Look Again.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

Today’s book is: Whiskey Tender: A Memoir (Harper, 2024), by Deborah Jackson Taffa, who was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Deborah Jackson Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.” 

Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Quechan (Yuma) reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Her childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation. Deborah Jackson Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.

Our guest is: Deborah Jackson Taffa, who is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, the Huffington Post, Prairie Schooner, The Best Travel Writing, and other outlets. 

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore which stories we tell and what happens to those we don’t.

Listeners may also be interested in this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

When Zed Zha came to the United States for her education, she faced barriers to medical school admission and financial aid, and to establishing a sense of belonging. Then unexpectedly, she found the feeling of “home” in rural New Hampshire. Dr. Zha joins us to share her blog post Where is Home? and to take us through her journey to her life now as a doctor in rural America, focused on underserved patients.

Our guest is: Dr. Zed Zha, who is a writer and a family doctor, a feminist and a fierce patient advocate. Her current work-in-progress is a non-fiction book project on medical misogyny. Dr. Zha is a board-certified family physician. She graduated from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, where she received the Gold Humanism Honor Society Award and the John F. Radebaugh Community Service Award. She completed her residency at the Mayo Clinic - La Crosse Family Medicine Residency, where she was the recipient of the Residency Research Award. Zed practiced full-scope primary care with obstetrics and hospital medicine in rural Washington state from 2019-2022, where she served as her organization’s COVID-19 Task Force Physician Lead. Currently, she is completing her fellowship in Underserved Dermatology.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. The Academic Life podcast is currently listened to in more than 150 countries. You can help support the show’s mission of democratizing education and sharing the hidden curriculum by downloading episodes, and by telling a friend—because knowledge is for everybody.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

Today’s book is: Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education (Broadleaf Books, 2024), by Dr. Jasmine L. Harris, which is an exploration of what it means to be a Black woman in higher education. Dr. Jasmine Harris shares her own experiences attempting to be a Vassar girl and reckoning with a lack of legacy and agency, while examining the day-to-day impacts on Black women as individuals, and the longer-term consequences to their professional lives, and the generational costs to entire families. Trial and error has been required of Black students to navigate systems of discrimination and disadvantage. But this book now offers useful support, illuminating the community of Black women dealing with similar issues. The author's story is not unusual, nor are her interactions anomalies. Black Women, Ivory Tower explores why.

Our guest is: Dr. Jasmine L. Harris, who is associate professor of African American Studies and coordinator of the African American Studies Program in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, San Antonio. A rising voice in the study of Black lives in the US, Dr. Harris's research and teaching focus on the experiences of Black people in predominantly white schools, specifically the social, physical, and economic impacts of their presence there. She has been published in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Women's Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

How do the pressures of academia affect our relationships with ourselves, our work, and with substance use? Dr. Alicia Andrzejewski joins us for a candid conversation about her recent HuffPost article on her struggle to get and stay sober.

Our guest is: Dr. Alicia Andrzejewski, who is an assistant professor in the department of English at William & Mary. She is a scholar of early modern literature and culture; queer, feminist, and critical race theory; and the medical humanities. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Chronicle, Literary Hub, The Huffington Post, and other publications. Her current book project is Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may be interested in this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the podcast by downloading Academic Life episodes, and by sharing the show with a friend—because knowledge is for everybody.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life