Genealogies of Modernity
16 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 months ago -Season 2 of Genealogies of Modernity is a limited series from the Genealogies of Modernity Project and Ministry of Ideas. Each episode takes up a well-worn story about what it means to be modern and how we got here, and then challenges that narrative with recent humanities scholarship. Genealogies of Modernity illuminates lesser-known pathways to the present and unearths overlooked resources from the past for flourishing in the future.
Genealogies of Modernity is a project of Beatrice Institute and Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, with major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For responses to the series, teaching aids, as well as artwork and videos, visit genealogiesofmodernity.org.
Ryan McDermott, Producer and Genealogies of Modernity Project Director .
Maria Devlin McNair, Senior Producer and Script Editor
Jack Pombriant, Sound Designer
Zachary Davis, Executive Producer (Ministry of Ideas)
Special thanks: Dan Cheely, James DeMasi, Peter Fristedt, Max Glider, Jake Grefenstette, Darrah McDermott, Jess Sweeney, University of Pittsburgh Department of English and Humanities Center, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
Season 1 was written and produced by Ena Gojak and Owen Joyce-Coughlan with the support of Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture.
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Episodes
The Enemy of Morality Is Not Modernity, It’s Me
December 20, 2023 13:00 - 44 minutes - 70.3 MBThe great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” style. But these two writers shared a common problem: once modernity fractured society’s sense of shared moral norms, how could you write persuasively about morality? This episode looks at how Johnson and Wallace attem...
A Genealogy of Gun Violence
December 13, 2023 13:00 - 51 minutes - 79.9 MBThe problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roots in the industrial revolution. Satia tells the story of British gun-maker Samuel Galton, Jr., who was called to task by his Quaker community for manufacturing rifles. As a professed pacifist, Galton had to wrestle with the large-scale uses to which his weapons were put. So where do we look for answers about how to regulate guns? Some claim the ...
A Medieval Anti-Racist
December 06, 2023 13:00 - 52 minutes - 81 MBWhat if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adorno, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of de...
Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico
November 29, 2023 13:00 - 1 hour - 91.9 MBRace is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes – to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating t...
Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family
November 22, 2023 13:17 - 45 minutes - 71.8 MBWhat is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the center of American identity and the source of American strength. But the idea of early American self-sufficiency is a myth. Caro Pirri tells the story of the precarious Jamestown settlement and how its residents depended on each other and on Indigenous Americans for survival. Early American history can help us imagine new kinds of interdep...
What Is Genealogy?
November 18, 2023 15:10 - 45 minutes - 72.3 MBGenealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against the potential dangers of claiming modernity. Against the effort to erase the past, genealogy asserts that our ancestry will always be with us. Against the effort to master the past, genealogy reminds us that our descendants have the freedom to create new futures. Sociologist Alondra Nelson tells the story of how African Americans have us...
What Is Modernity?
November 18, 2023 15:09 - 36 minutes - 58.8 MBWe often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood not as a period on a timeline but as a claim to freedom from the past. By re...
Climbing the Mountains of Modernity
November 18, 2023 14:47 - 46 minutes - 72.6 MBWe all know many stories about how modernity came about. But what does it mean to be “modern?” This episode comes at the question through the test case of mountain climbing and rock climbing. Claims to becoming modern through climbing often point back to Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1336, a climb that made him, according to many historians, “the first modern man.” But Petrarch was by no means the first person to climb Mt. Ventoux, and his own account is, if ...
Episode 4 - Chris Nygren
October 21, 2019 13:42 - 1 hour - 68.7 MBThis week’s episode is based on Chris Nygren’s session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with him afterwards. Chris is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. He discusses the genealogy of art written by Giorgio Vasari in 16th century Florence, and the ways that it is taken to be normative in what constitutes ‘modernity’ in art even into the 21st century.
Chris Nygren – Giorgio Vasari and Genealogies in Art History
October 21, 2019 13:42 - 1 hour - 68.7 MBThis week’s episode is based on Chris Nygren’s session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with him afterwards. Chris is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. He discusses the genealogy of art written by Giorgio Vasari in 16th century Florence, and the ways that it is taken to be normative in what constitutes ‘modernity’ in art even into the 21st century.
Episode 3 - Eileen Reeves
October 21, 2019 13:41 - 1 hour - 59.1 MBThis week’s episode is based on Eileen Reeves’ session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with her afterwards. Eileen is a professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She speaks to us about the new ground that natural philosophy was broaching in the 17th century, with an emphasis on Galileo, and questions the usefulness of the monolithic concept of ‘The Scientific Revolution’ in telling that story.
Eileen Reeves - Galileo and Early Modern Science
October 21, 2019 13:41 - 1 hour - 59.1 MBThis week’s episode is based on Eileen Reeves’ session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with her afterwards. Eileen is a professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She speaks to us about the new ground that natural philosophy was broaching in the 17th century, with an emphasis on Galileo, and questions the usefulness of the monolithic concept of ‘The Scientific Revolution’ in telling that story.
Episode 2 - Karen Detlefsen
October 21, 2019 13:40 - 1 hour - 61.5 MBThis week’s episode is based on an interview we conducted with Karen Detlefsen, professor of Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Karen takes us through the so-called ‘standard narrative’ of early modern philosophy and illustrates how it serves to exclude very many important thinkers from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Karen Detlefsen - Women in Early Modern Philosophy
October 21, 2019 13:40 - 1 hour - 61.5 MBThis week’s episode is based on an interview we conducted with Karen Detlefsen, professor of Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Karen takes us through the so-called ‘standard narrative’ of early modern philosophy and illustrates how it serves to exclude very many important thinkers from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Ryan McDermott - On Genealogy
October 21, 2019 13:39 - 1 hour - 59.9 MBThe first episode of the podcast is based on Ryan McDermott’s session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with him afterwards. Ryan is a professor of medieval and reformation English literature at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the originators of the Genealogies of Modernity project as a whole. We discuss with Ryan the many and varied senses that genealogy has as a term and methodology in the humanities, before looking at some particular examples of...
Episode 1 - Ryan McDermott
October 21, 2019 13:39 - 1 hour - 59.9 MBThe first episode of the podcast is based on Ryan McDermott’s session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with him afterwards. Ryan is a professor of medieval and reformation English literature at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the originators of the Genealogies of Modernity project as a whole. We discuss with Ryan the many and varied senses that genealogy has as a term and methodology in the humanities, before looking at some particular examples of...