Podcasts Archives | Page 11 of 13 | National Humanities Center

Podcasts

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David Christian, “Big History: Between Nothing and Everything”

Since the early modern era, history has been largely viewed through an anthropocentric lens, skewing towards the involvement of humans. David Christian (NHC Fellow 2006-07) flips this narrative by zooming out to see history—specifically, Big History—on a larger scale, measured by geological and cosmological time. Bringing together fields as seemingly disparate as cosmology, anthropology, and geology, Big History offers what Christian calls “a unifying origin story” that explains our origin and place in the universe, bridging the humanities with the social sciences.

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Benjamin Kahan, “The Great Paradigm Shift: Locating Lost Models of Sexuality”

Scholars in gender and sexuality studies have largely ignored or dismissed attempts to explain the causes of sexual deviation for a variety of reasons. In this podcast, Fellow Benjamin Kahan discusses how his work, exploring “the historical etiology of sexuality,” moves past those scholars’ dismissal of early sexuality theories in hopes of producing a fuller understanding of how contemporary attitudes and notions about sexuality developed.

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Kate Marshall, “The Nonhuman Turn in American Literature”

Non-human, post-human, anti-human. In recent years, historians, political theorists, philosophers and others have increasingly tried to think beyond an anthropocentric perspective to gain insights on a wide range of questions. But these ways of thinking have a long precedent in American fiction. In this podcast, Fellow Kate Marshall, associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, discusses how weird fiction, cosmic realism, and pseudo-science fiction have imaginatively grappled with non-human points of view from the late 19th century to the present.

Weaver Academy

Samantha Shires: “Piloting Humanities Moments at Weaver Academy”

The Humanities Moments pilot project at Weaver Academy in Greensboro, North Carolina introduces high school students to the role the humanities play in their lives. The value of the project is visible across the entire school from increasing self-understanding among students and bridging the gap between STEM and arts educators to teaching life preparedness and vital skills like critical thinking and empathy needed beyond high school.

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Blake Wilson, “Poetry and Music in Early Modern Italy”

While we often think of Renaissance-era Florence and the surrounding area as brimming with intellectual inquiry, artistic genius, and political intrigue, music and poetry were also important elements of life and to the Studia Humanitatis, the core of early modern education. In this podcast, Fellow Blake Wilson, professor of music at Dickinson College discusses his current project exploring the music and oral performance traditions of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance — how it was composed and performed as well as its relationship to other art forms in creating the rich civic and cultural life of the Renaissance.

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Douglas Campbell: “Assessing the Historical Accuracy of the Book of Acts”

Surviving accounts of the foundation of the early Christian church are extremely limited, leaving scholars with few sources beyond the narrative found in the fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles. And, for centuries, questions have persisted about the book of Acts itself: Who wrote it and for whom? What was the document's purpose? And, how historically reliable is the account it provides?

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Zsuzsanna Gulácsi, “Art and Religious Instruction in Late Ancient and Medieval Asia”

Beyond their inspirational and devotional power, what other functions do religious works of art serve? From antiquity through the medieval periods, ​​practitioners ​of many religious traditions ​throughout central Asia used ​works of art to teach​ followers religious histories, parables, and central tenets of their faith.​ How does this use inform our appreciation of these works and what can we learn from examining these religious practices?

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Tatiana Seijas, “Indigenous Trade in the Early Modern Southwest and Mexico”

For centuries before the arrival of Europeans, trade routes connected the various peoples who lived throughout the American Southwest and Mexico, and trade among these groups remained an important source of economic vitality and cultural exchange even after the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. In later years, these routes formed the basis of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, connecting merchants and communities from Mexico City to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Miguel La Serna, “The Rise and Fall of the Shining Path”

Beginning as a small group of intellectual ideologues, the Shining Path grew to become a significant insurgency movement whose violent practices resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Peruvians in the late twentieth century. However, to understand the Shining Path's history and its influence, it is important to understand its origins and the motivations of the individuals who formed its leadership.