Bowdoin Presents

Tracy McMullen is a self-proclaimed maker-thinker. She's a saxophonist, composer, and an academic. In this episode, Tracy discusses jazz as a moral practice and how she uses music—jazz in particular—to teach anti-racism and inclusivity. Tracy McMullen is associate professor of music at Bowdoin College, and ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow at the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice (through 2023). Her 2019 book, "Haunthenticity: Musical Replay and the Fear of the Real," examines musical performance and its relationship to conceptions of the past, history, and identity. She is currently researching her second book, "Jazz Humanism: Responsibility and Blur in the New Human."

Tracy McMullen is a self-proclaimed maker-thinker. She's a saxophonist, composer, and an academic. In this episode, Tracy discusses jazz as a moral practice and how she uses music—jazz in particular—to teach anti-racism and inclusivity. Tracy

Professor Zorina Khan is trying to answer the question of how the US overtook England and France as an economic powerhouse in the nineteenth century. In this episode, she talks about the unique US attitude to creativity, ideas, and innovation that she believes underlies the country's industrial successes. Professor Khan also shares anecdotes from her current research focusing on an often neglected and marginalized group of inventors: women. Zorina Khan is the William D. Shipman Professor of Economics at Bowdoin College. Her most recent book, Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy, was awarded the Alice Hanson Jones Biennial Prize by the Economic History Association, as was her 2005 book, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development.

Professor Birgit Tautz is on a treasure hunt. She's mining the local literary scene of Germany in the 1800s to tell a much larger story of global literature, then and now. In this episode, Professor Tautz talks about German literature, translation, and how she works within the field of digital humanities. Tautz is the George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin. Her most recent book, Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature around 1800 (PSU Press, 2018), is the winner of the 2019 SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) Studies Book Award.

As a historian of science and scholar of Islam, Professor Robert Morrison wants to know how information spread around the Mediterranean in medieval times. In this conversation, we talk about horoscopes, medieval party tricks, and how Copernicus figured out that the planets circle the sun. Morrison is the George Lincoln Skolfield Jr. Professor of Religion and Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin, and the author of several books, most recently Astronomy in al-Andalus: Joseph Ibn Naḥmias' The Light of the World (University of California Press, 2016).

Anne Collins Goodyear and Frank Goodyear codirect the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. In this episode, they discuss how the pandemic challenged them to reinvent the museum as a lively virtual space, and a truly antiracist institution. Anne Collins Goodyear was curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where she became the first curator to collect digital and time-based art. Frank H. Goodyear was curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of ten peer-reviewed scholarly essays and five books.

Roger Howell Jr. Professor of History David Gordon discusses his interpretation of the African legend “the Lunda love story” as a peace treaty of sorts, along with his research using art and oral tradition and archival sources to explore nineteenth-century political transformations in the central African interior. In the course of the conversation, he talks about the reason African art can be found in Portuguese museums and tells the story of a statue that goes missing in the 1970s right from its display case. Gordon, who teaches history, earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and his PhD at Princeton.

Bowdoin Visiting Professor of English Zahir Janmohamed explores, as a writer and from the standpoint of his experience in Congress and in humanitarian work, how storytelling and understanding the complex messiness of every person and of our history can combine to result in political and social change. But only when the will is there to make it happen.

Denise Gitsham '99 has worked in the Department of Justice, the White House, the Senate, and ran for Congress in 2016. She's a conservative who believes we all need to talk to and strive to understand our neighbors. She's optimistic that we can engage with one another with civility, kindness, and respect—and that one person being right doesn't have to mean the other is wrong. Listen, stay humble, and learn a lot along the way.

Emily Hubbard '07, assistant director with the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC, talks about how we've traditionally defined work and employment in the context of citizenship and why many of those definitions are flawed. What does modern citizenship mean in consideration of modern notions and realities of labor? How can labor law help to protect and evolve our democracy?

Kate Dempsey '88, Maine's state director for The Nature Conservancy, will talk about the climate crisis in the context of certain challenges it poses for our democracy. Is our liberal democratic process too slow and cumbersome to effectively address an acute climate challenge? What is the relationship between solving our climate crisis and democracy?

Noah Finberg '16, former CEO of Considdr and now head of data for Firm Prospects, will discuss information polarization and democracy. Is part of the explanation for political polarization that our minds aren't very good at forming evidence-based beliefs? With so much information we now have at our disposal, why is information more likely to be weaponized than to be harnessed as fuel for “a new Socratic age?”

Associate Professor of Government Laurence takes on the issue of democracy and the media. What role does the growth of sensationalist, opinionated, misleading, or even false journalism play in subverting democracy? Is there a role that public broadcasting can uniquely play to address this crisis? Laurence, who teaches comparative politics and political economy at Bowdoin, is the author of the book Money Rules: The New Politics of Finance (Cornell University Press, 2001).