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Hi Podcast Fam!
The Humanities Podcast Network is obsessed with podcasts. We love making podcasts, talking podcasts, and we especially love listening to podcasts. Below is a list of new episodes from HPN members. Every month we’re going to share new episodes and podcasts from HPN members and podcasts we think everyone needs to hear.
Podcasting thrives on word of mouth. Please share your podcast or podcasts you think people need to listen to for next month’s newsletter. When you send your podcast episode please include a short description of the episode/podcast and an image. Email humanitiespodnetwork@gmail.com with “HPN Podcast Spotlight” in the subject line.
The History on Film Podcast
Hosted by Ross Lennon
Episode: The Other Gangs of New York:
“West Side Story”(1961)
Ross and Ryan kick off Musical May with 1961’s “West Side Story”! We look at how anxieties around juvenile delinquency in the 1950s connects to the Cold War, Puerto Rico and the Great Migration, and much more. Make sure to catch the rest of our Musical May series to hear us cover “Cabaret” (1971), “Xanadu” (1980), and “Les Miserables” (2012)! The History on Film Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, with new episodes every Monday morning!
Listen on the site and wherever you get your podcasts!
Long Life Learning
Produced by Rebecca Barry
Episode: Jeffrey Sonnenfeld on How Successful Leaders Learn
To kick off Season 2, Kavitha sits down with Yale SOM Professor and Senior Associate Dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld to discuss the evergreen question, “How do leaders learn?” Drawing on Jeff’s decades of research expertise, high-profile media engagement, and longtime partnership with Executive Education, they attempt to answer this question for senior level leaders and C-Suite executives in particular.
Listen on the site and wherever you get your podcasts!
Think About It
Hosted by Uli Baer
Episode: How to Fall in Love with Questions
What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek quick answers dispensed by “experts,” influencers, and gurus. But these one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy, and can even cause more pain.
In How to Fall in Love With Questions, Elizabeth Weingarten finds inspiration in a few famous lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and then takes this insight – to love the questions themselves – to modern science to offer a fresh approach for dealing with the uncertainty in our lives.
What if our questions—the ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose—are not our tormentors, but our teachers? Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with seemingly unsolvable questions, not as a quick fix but to deepen our sense of being fully alive. Weingarten shares her own journey and the stories of others, including a part of my own story after the events of 9/11 in New York City when I first turned to Rilke’s letters, to chart a different, and better, relationship with uncertainty.
Designed to inspire anyone who feels stuck, powerless, and drained, How to Fall in Love with Questions challenges us to unlock our minds and embark on the kind of self-discovery that’s only possible when we feel most alive—that is, when we don’t know what will happen next.
Listen on the site and wherever you get your podcasts!
Episode: Emily Dickinson, with Sharon Cameron
We need Emily Dickinson’s startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinson’s poetry, to explore some of Dickinson’s poems in an extra-long podcast.
“It’s astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I am still ‘awed beyond my errand’ by how Dickinson’s poems let us experience something viscerally, at the edge of comprehension,” Cameron remarks in this conversation that forgoes clichés and favors critical acumen. By closely considering a few poems, Cameron explains how Dickinson speaks from placeless places and from within experiences outside of language, how her poems create wonder, and how her poems link without merging the mundane, the erotic, and other incommensurate dimensions of life. Sharon Cameron’s book include: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre; Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles; and, most recently, The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability (Chicago University Press, 2024), on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens.
Listen on the site and wherever you get your podcasts!
Arts & Letters
Hosted by J. Bradley Minnick
Episode: Pedagogy of the Depressed
This episode navigates one professor’s thinking about higher education in the 21st century; from growing student mental health concerns, to radical shifts in classroom delivery, to the pandemic, Professor Christopher Schaberg talks about his book, Pedagogy of the Depressed published by Bloomsbury Academic.
The book asks us to think about many questions facing higher education today. How in our technologically-driven world might we enact what Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed imagined as reading and writing the world?
How in the midst of our post-pandemic response, do our current and evolving concepts of a well-rounded education and the potential of the humanities help us think critically? What does it mean to teach with Zoom and asynchronous classrooms beckoning and how do we reflect on and respond to the conditions of learning in light of collective trauma we’ve all been through?
Listen on the site and wherever you get your podcasts!
Writing Remix Podcast
Hosted by Dan Dissinger
Episode: Creating Joy & Community Through Poetry w/ West Hollywood Poet Laureate Jen Cheng
Dan Dissinger celebrates National Poetry Month with the West Hollywood Poet Laureate, Jen Cheng. They talk about Jen’s multi-hyphenate creative journey, her dedication to blending East-West influences in her writing and workshops, her role as the creator of the Palabras Literary Salon, and the importance of “artist dates.” Dan asks Jen to explain why she believes community is so significant in the creative process and or writers, and how writing a novel is different from writing poetry.
How in the midst of our post-pandemic response, do our current and evolving concepts of a well-rounded education and the potential of the humanities help us think critically? What does it mean to teach with Zoom and asynchronous classrooms beckoning and how do we reflect on and respond to the conditions of learning in light of collective trauma we’ve all been through?
Listen on the site and wherever you get your podcasts!
Looking for something silly? 🤪
The Nostalgia Test Podcast
Hosted by Dan Dissinger, Manny Coelho, & Billy D’Elia
Episode: Nostalgic Jingles, Commercials, & Tangents
Get ready to take a deep-dive down the nostalgia wormhole with Dan, Billy, & Manny as they put nostalgic jingles and commercials to the ultimate test—THE NOSTALGIA TEST!
“Before the barbecue sauce [goes on the McRib] it looks like corpse flesh. Like I worked at McDonald’s, and it’s like the color of like corpse flesh.”
-Billy D’Elia
The guys put the commercial & jingles from their childhood to the test like ‘Zestfully Clean’, ‘Big Red’, ‘Pizza Bagel Bites’, and the infamous ‘Chili’s Baby Back Ribs’. They also try to figure out what was so fancy about Mount Airy Lodge, how did anyone survive Action Park, the infamous ‘Crocodile Mile,’ and let’s not forget the most Long Island commercial of all time for the ‘Commack Motor Inn’. This classic Nostalgia Test, so come hangout, chop it up, and drop your favorite commercial in the comments!
Listen on the site and wherever you get your podcasts!
