With Good Reason

As robots become ubiquitous, will humans trust or fear them? James Bliss (Old Dominion University) is studying how people might interact with robots that act as military peacekeepers.

Scott England (Virginia Tech) is part of a team that won an award for discoveries on Mars. Now he’s leading a new NASA mission to explore this lesser known upper atmosphere.

A fourth-generation shipbuilder is helping bring paperless shipbuilding to the U.S. Navy. Jennifer Grimsley Michaeli (Old Dominion University) is the great-granddaughter of a man who built ships for England in the 1800’s.

Andrew Folsom fell in love with welding after taking classes at Blue Ridge Community College. Now, thanks to a big investment by the state of Virginia, he’s training others and the classes are packed.

An English professor who loves the Harry Potter books brings a few lucky students each year to London to visit the magical sites in the fantasy series. Alicia DeFonzo (Old Dominion University) leads them to the set of Hogwarts school and Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross Station for 3 weeks of study of magical creatures, potions, and herbology. And: The epic fantasy series Game of Thrones will return for its six-episode, eighth and final season April 14. Matthew Gabriele (Virginia Tech) shows how the women of Westeros gain and lose power in the fictional patriarchal world of dragons and warfare.

Later in the show: When segregation and Jim Crow locked African Americans out of Hollywood, the first independent film industry was born. L. Roi Boyd, III (Virginia State University) explains what motivated these early indie directors and who you might recognize acting in the films.

Since it opened in 1993, millions of people have visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. How does their experience compare to that of visitors to other Holocaust museums, such as the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the Jewish Museum Berlin? Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich (University of Mary Washington) is the author of Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation.

Amy Milligan's (Old Dominion University) research on marginalized Jewish voices has taken her to some unexpected places. But even Milligan was surprised to find herself in Selma, Alabama, a city known more for civil rights than for synagogues.

Later in the show: Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, the first Jewish American to reach that rank in the United States Navy, is also an unsung hero of U.S. history. Melvin Urofsky (Virginia Commonwealth University) says Levy rescued Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello from ruin.

The “Golem” is a fictional creature of Jewish legend. David Metzger (Old Dominion University) says it was also the inspiration for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

What’s the role of poetry in the face of tragedy? Henry Hart (William and Mary) is Virginia’s poet laureate. He shares how poetry can emerge in the wake of loss. And: In college, Laura Bylenok (University of Mary Washington) was fascinated with genetic engineering. Now, she manipulates language, not DNA. Her recent book turns familiar forms into poetic laboratory experiments. Later in the show: To some, poetry and medicine seem like opposites. But pediatrician and poet Irène Mathieu (University of Virginia) says both science and poetry use language to understand deeper truths about the human condition. Mathieu’s latest collection, Grande Marronage, examines the lives of Creole women of color in New Orleans.

Stacey Houston (George Mason University) has spent his career looking at the complex web between education, health, and the justice system. He says kids who interact in some way with the justice system—even if it’s just living near a justice system facility—have worse health and educational outcomes. Plus: The laws affecting indentured servants and enslaved people were constantly evolving during the earliest years of America. Allison Madar (Virginia Humanities) says the colonists had a culture of violence toward enslaved people and the laws they designed to control slaves also enhanced their power over women and mixed-race servants.

Later in the show: Conversations about prison tend to focus on incarcerated men in urban areas. Bonnie Zare (Virginia Tech) takes us inside a rural Wyoming women’s prison to understand the experiences of what some women call “Camp Cupcake.”

400 years ago, in 1619, the first Africans arrived in English-speaking North America. Cassandra Newby-Alexander (Norfolk State University) explores how we should commemorate that history and what’s at stake when we ignore it.

Richard Chew (Virginia State University) explains how a British king’s fear of being beheaded impacted the expansion of slavery in the US colonies.

Plantations in America’s South are physical testaments to the great wealth accrued through slave labor. Stephen Hanna (University of Mary Washington) says plantation museums often gloss over that economic history in favor of more romanticized depictions of plantation life.

There’s little historical evidence that African Americans supported the Confederate cause by becoming soldiers. Yet this myth of the “black Confederate” remains in circulation. Gabriel Reich (Virginia Commonwealth University) studies the way collective memories of the Civil War are shaped and offers ways school curricula could address these problematic narratives.

Kathryn Howell and Ben Teresa (Virginia Commonwealth University) are part of the RVA Eviction Lab which gathers data on eviction rates. They say high eviction rates destabilize communities, cause high turnover in student populations, and reduce community engagement and access to community networks and jobs.

People who live on or near American Indian reservations are being denied access to consumer credit. Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl (Virginia Military Institute) says redlining is a factor. Dimitrova-Grajzl has been named a 2019 outstanding faculty member by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

Later in the show: Michael Lewis talks about his newest book, The 5th Risk, about the consequences of giving people control over our government agencies who have no idea how they work. Michael Lewis is the author of The Blind Side, Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, and The Big Short, among many others.

These days, due in large part to the work of Thomas Platts-Mills (University of Virginia), we know the sudden meat allergy is real and it’s caused by tick bites.

And: Philosopher Jesse Kirkpatrick (George Mason University) says he’s less worried about human gene editing and more interested in how CRISPR technology can be used to enhance—or harm—the environment around us.

Later in the show: In Japanese folklore, when a brightly colored fish resembling a dragon washes up on shore, its arrival is a harbinger of earthquakes and tsunamis. Jennifer Martin (Thomas Nelson Community College) is an oceanographer and has studied both the natural and cultural history of this species, called the oarfish.

Plus: Hannes Schniepp (William and Mary) studies poisonous brown recluse spiders to learn how their incredibly strong silk is made and how humans might try to replicate it.

Even as shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose bring that culture into the mainstream, real-life gay bars and clubs are shuttering. DJ and Professor madison moore (Virginia Commonwealth University) argues that the club scene and the “fabulous” fashions on display there are radical spaces for queer and trans of color togetherness.

Gregory Samantha Rosenthal (Roanoke College), Don Muse, and Peter Thornhill describe the sometimes-dangerous, always-exciting gay bars of the 1970s and 1980s in Roanoke, VA, before the AIDS crisis and gentrification changed the scene forever.

Growing up, Lauron Kehrer (William and Mary) wasn't allowed to listen to hip-hop music. Now, she studies it for a living. Kehrer says hip-hop by both straight and LGBTQ artists can help us better understand race, gender, and sexuality.

Choreographer and performer Al Evangelista brings us into the world of experimental queer Pilipinx-American dance, a form that he says can spark conversations and social change.

Frank Newsome is an Old Regular Baptist preacher, singer of lined-out hymnody, and former coal miner in Appalachia. Virginia’s State Folklorist Jon Lohman (Virginia Humanities) describes Newsome’s musical tradition and its influence on bluegrass, gospel, and oldtime music.

Travel to the Carpathian Mountains in Romania and you’ll find a place that’s not unlike southwest Virginia and Kentucky. Theresa Burris (Radford University) says the parallels of these two regions are striking.

Later in the show: Wally Smith (UVA Wise) recently found a type of green salamander that lives in this habitat of vertical cliffs, bluffs, and rock crevices.

Plus: James Vance (UVA Wise) hopes to find ways to help animals avoid crossing a particularly high-traffic area.