Podcast Episodes available on IPFS

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Halloween Special: Alice Walker’s Cat

High Theory - October 28, 2022 08:00 - 20 minutes
Saronik tells Kim about Alice Walker’s book Anything We Love Can Be Saved, where she talks about her many cats over the years, and how they represented her connection with the cosmos. Image: “Rescued from the rough streets of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Princess Marmalade earned her PhD in Meowolo...

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Halloween Special: Jacques Derrida’s Cat

High Theory - October 27, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutes
Saronik talks with Kim about Jacques Derrida’s cat. Derrida writes about his cat, who makes him rather anxious, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276 Image: “Beatrix or Bea o...

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Halloween Special: Michel de Montaigne’s Cat

High Theory - October 24, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutes
In part one of our Halloween Special on Cats, Kim talks with John Guilliory about Montaigne’s essay “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Montaigne asks us: “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?” John Guillory is a professor of English at ...

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Sextuality

High Theory - June 29, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutes
Stephen Guy-Bray talks about sexuality, a concept that brings together the the use of sexual metaphors in the description of textual production and the erotics that inhere in reading praxes. Among other things, this concept is a critique of the use of popular heteronormative metaphors of reproduc...

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Cognitive Cultural Studies

High Theory - June 28, 2022 08:00 - 15 minutes
Torsa Ghosal talks about Cognitive Cultural Studies, a field that entails methodologies that situate the human mind in historical and cultural contexts, sometimes working against models of the mind proceeding from the Cognitive Sciences. This includes inquiries into how narratives mediate knowled...

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WikiVictorian

High Theory - June 27, 2022 08:00 - 10 minutes
Helena DiGiusti talks about @WikiVictorian, the Twitter account that she runs. More than a traditional wiki, it embodies the randomness and miscellaneous nature of so much of Victorian cultures. She talks about the origins of the account in her interest in Victorian fashion, art, and history, and...

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Archives

High Theory - June 24, 2022 20:00 - 16 minutes
Matt Poland talks about the meaning of archives, the nature of their construction, the physical environments that archives engender, and their emancipatory possibilities. Besides his own work on the archives of George Eliot, he talks about The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project, The Teaching Arch...

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Lust

High Theory - June 24, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes
Eric Wade speaks with Saronik about lust. They discuss how depictions of sexuality in medieval literature have persisted through literary traditions and shaped modern ideas of Orientalism and the sexual other. In the episode, Eric mentions a number of modern theorists, including Edward Said, Jose...

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Drone Life

High Theory - June 22, 2022 08:00 - 19 minutes
Amy Gaeta uses the relationship between humans and technology, non-military use of drones being a prime example, to rethink concepts of passivity and how it can bring about change. She makes an intervention in science and technology studies from her position in feminist and disability studies, dr...

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The Hyperlocal

High Theory - June 21, 2022 08:00 - 15 minutes
Nicholas Birns talks about ‘the hyperlocal’, a modality of American journalism in the early 1990s that he adapts to characterize a flexible and transposable concept of the local used in eighteenth and nineteenth century British and American literatures. Nicholas Birns teaches at the Center for Ap...

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Fandom

High Theory - June 17, 2022 08:00 - 18 minutes
andré carrington talks about the origins of contemporary fandoms, race and gender as its determinants, and its emancipatory potential in the face of cooption by big media conglomerates. Besides andrés book Speculative Blackness, references are made, among other things, to the work of Carolyn Dins...

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Economics

High Theory - June 16, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes
Matt Seybold talks about the development of economics as a discourse inside and outside the academy, its success in making itself felt to be the only discourse that can talk about resource management and distribution, and its many complicities with capitalism. The conversation ranges from the ori...

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Theory from the South with Borderlines

High Theory - June 15, 2022 08:00 - 24 minutes
Olga Verlato and Antara Chakrabarti, contributing editors at Borderlines, talk about the concept of theory from the south, which critiques the notion that theory originating from the global north exhausts the possibilities of critical theoretical understanding. Olga Verlato is a PhD candidate at ...

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Ghazal

High Theory - June 14, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes
Manan Kapoor talks about the Ghazal, the medieval Arabic poetic form which travelled to the Indian subcontinent in the 12th century and flourished there ever since. He focuses on the work of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet who perfected the art of the ghazal in the English language. K...

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Deindustrialization

High Theory - June 13, 2022 08:00 - 17 minutes
Gabriel Winant talks with Kim about the decline of the industrial working class and the rise of the health care industry. Gabriel is an assistant professor of History at the University of Chicago. His book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, is ...

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Decolonial Queerness

High Theory - June 10, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes
Sandeep Bakshi (@sandeepbak on Twitter) talks to Saronik about understanding queerness and its emancipatory politics through transnational solidarity building, the persistent inclusion of trans and queer epistemological frames in social justice movements, especially in the work done by the Decolo...

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Racial Affect

High Theory - June 09, 2022 08:00 - 15 minutes
Oishani Sengupta talks about the felt experiences of racism, especially as they are represented in Victorian literature and its contemporary readership, which is the subject of her research. The conversation ranges from the novels of H. Rider Haggard and Charles Dickens to the felt experience of ...

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Modernization

High Theory - June 08, 2022 08:00 - 17 minutes
Varsha Venkatasubramanian discusses the many trajectories of modernization as a theoretical concept. She focuses mainly on the history of development in the US and in India, through the cold war years and continuing to the present day. Varsha (@varsha_venkat_ on Twitter) is a graduate student foc...

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Sexual Difference

High Theory - June 07, 2022 08:00 - 19 minutes
Emma Heaney talks about the social organization of the supposedly biologically derived terms of the sex binary into a hierarchy of persons and qualities. She speaks widely about the work that she and her colleagues are doing, drawing on a tradition of scholarship that includes the work of Luce Ir...

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Resonance

High Theory - June 06, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutes
Kim speaks with Julie Beth Napolin about Resonance. Julie Beth’s book The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020) explores resonance and sound in modern literature. In the episode she references Jean-Luc Nancy’s book Listening (Fordham UP, 2007), Inayat Khan’s...

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Experimental Life

High Theory - June 03, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes
Travis Chi Wing Lau talks about the notion that one can experiment on the fundamental conditions and nature of life in order to perfect them. He looks at this idea in diverse literary, scientific, and cultural contexts from the vitality debate and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the perils of the ...

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Realism

High Theory - June 02, 2022 08:00 - 19 minutes
William Ghosh talks to Saronik about Realism, and how it can both be subtly conservative and effectively radical, depending on its use. He takes us through realist tactics in texts ranging from V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River to Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex. William Ghosh teaches Victor...

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Crosswords

High Theory - May 31, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes
In this episode Kim talks to Adrienne Raphel about crossword puzzles. For lots more about crosswords, check out Adrienne’s book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Random House, 2021) For some of the historical puzzles s...

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Modernist Mushrooms

High Theory - May 30, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutes
Shalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and the research of Sam Solomon and Natalia Cecire. Modernist mushrooms, ...

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Undisciplining

High Theory - May 27, 2022 08:00 - 15 minutes
Kim talks to Amy Wong, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, and Alicia Christoff about ‘Undisciplining’, a term they borrowed from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and have used in an article and a journal issue to signify a heuristic that would help bring modes of knowledge and methodologies to Victorian Studies...

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Abolition

High Theory - May 26, 2022 08:00 - 17 minutes
Leading up to Mayday, the nationwide Day of Refusal, and Abolition May, Saronik talks with Sean Gordon about abolition as an historical movement to end the transatlantic slave trade and a transformative justice movement to abolish prisons and defund the police. The episode focuses on the relation...

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Distant Reading

High Theory - May 25, 2022 08:00 - 15 minutes
In this episode Kim talks with Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu about distant reading. Ama Bemma provides her Global Poetics Project as an awesome example of distant reading. She also references Franco Moretti’s book Distant Reading (Verso, 2013) and Ted Underwood’s essay “A Genealogy of Distant Reading” ...

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The Right to Maim

High Theory - May 24, 2022 08:00 - 14 minutes
Bassam Sidiki talks about the right to maim, the titular concept in Jasbir K. Puar’s book, and the related concept of debility. He explains how these concepts have changed how the field of disability studies orients itself. References are made to Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s new book Epidemic Empire...

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Autotheory

High Theory - May 23, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutes
In this episode Kim speaks with Lauren Fournier about autotheory. Lauren has recently published a book on the subject, titled Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Press, 2021). In the episode she points to Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts as the book that made the...

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Military Industrial Complex

High Theory - May 20, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes
Kim talks to Patrick Deer about the Military Industrial Complex, a term used by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a 1961 speech to describe a permanent war economy, and the political, economic, and cultural matrix that sustains it. References are made to James Ledbetter’s book Unwarranted Infl...