I Think of It as a Diary

An interview with Anne Waldman about her book Bard, Kinetic and a political life well-lived

Lindsey Scharold spoke with Waldman about where these themes overlap: where others intersect with memoir, where the spiritual aligns with the political, and where theory and practice meet....

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I Think of It as a Diary

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

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What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Documenting the City of Refugees

An interview with Susan Hartman on her new book about Utica’s transformation by refugees

I wanted to put in perspective what these refugees had gone through, what the countries they left had gone through, what the refugee camp experience was like. So, there is this part where I talk about when they were each on the run: it is very traumatic material and this ...
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Documenting the City of Refugees

Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Scholars Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics and significance of the Chilean estallido

Wearing protest iconography was also a way to support the movement. And it was potentially risky. You could wear a handkerchief to cover your eyes from tear gas or to make yourself more anonymous or you could wear a green scarf to support reproductive rights. ...

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Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Interpretations of the Past

Historian Michael D. Hattem discusses historical memory, reckoning with the creation of “American history”, and his recent book

That put this question in my head: how, and when, did these British colonists, now Americans, stop thinking that the British past was their history? And how did they come to replace it with what we now call “American history”? That question then became the project’s overarching framework: reckoning with ...
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Interpretations of the Past

Making Poetry Fun and Daring

An interview with award-winning poet Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang is a Chinese American poet whose writing explores themes of death and grief. In her new book The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) Chang explores how we experience grief over time, and how nature experiences it along with us. Informed by the pandemic, the theme of ...
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Making Poetry Fun and Daring

When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

Anthropologist Ruth Behar discusses writing across genres, making ideas accessible, and a new children’s book

Behar spoke with Public Seminar about writing for young readers, how people and their stories are intertwined in both fiction and anthropology, and the importance of telling stories with ethnographic accuracy....

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When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

How to Become a Queer Historian

An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein

Marc Stein is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where he teaches U.S. law, politics, sexuality, gender, race, and social movements. He’s also an old friend: we met when Marc was in graduate school and I was starting my career as a visiting professor at The University of ...
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How to Become a Queer Historian