Criss Cross: The NYU Gallatin Podcast

For the opening episode of Season Two of Criss Cross, host KC Trommer spoke with Gallatin faculty member and celebrated interdisciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian. Katchadourian spent a good piece of the pandemic working on a collaboration. Her collaborator, Douglas Robertson, was a survivor of a 1972 shipwreck who was the subject of a book that Katchadourian has read over forty times, Survive the Savage Sea. Katchadourian's work engages with self-imposed constraints and this collaboration is no exception. It was, in fact, a constraint within a constraint, with the artist creating a collaborative project in the pandemic about an event that forced a group of six into a dinghy to survive in the Pacific as castaways for 38 days. The project and the subject ask how one can make a limitation into an asset? How does one turn an obsession into art?

“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”—Shirley Chisholm  What does it mean to invite all to the table for a conversation about Black womanhood? What if the space is shared and the invitation and is an open one? What might we discuss and what might we learn? For our sixth episode, host KC Trommer spoke with sociologist and Gallatin faculty member Shatima Jones and her former student Cheyenne Porcher about A Seat at Our Table, a collaboration between Professor Jones' courses, "Detangling the Business of Black Women's Hair" and "Black Experiences in Literature, Movies, and Television," and Gallatin's online platform for student reading, writing, and research, Confluence.

If the COVID-19 pandemic has asked us all to break with our past and to imagine a new world, what could it look like? How do activists maintain their engagement in the face of so much turbulence? Center for Artistic Activism co-founder Stephen Duncombe and activist and Gallatin student Sophie Jones share their thoughts on activism and what the social, racial, and economic upheavals of the past year have made possible—and the work still ahead.

"One of the advantages that anyone in the creative arts has is having the muscle to kind of shake yourself out of routines and to remain an eternal student." --Kwami Coleman For our fourth episode, host KC Trommer speaks with musician and Gallatin faculty member Kwami Coleman and alumna Rosie K (BA ’08) about 4th Wave, the Gallatin Summer Music Intensive, for a discussion about collaboration, improvisation, and music-making.

“What's thrilling about teaching, what's exciting about teaching, and always satisfying about teaching, is that you are involved in people discovering their own intellectual and imaginative capacity. And it's an incredible thing to witness." –George Shulman In our third episode, host KC Trommer speaks with scholar and political theorist George Shulman about his teaching at Gallatin, the history of the School, the ways in which speech and political theory are forms of storytelling, as well as his teaching with the Prison Education Program, the enduring appeal of Moby Dick–and the dangers of the political moment we are living through.

“We like to forget how hard it is to do science and how it could have been different. A simple story of science seems more true, more convincing.” –Matthew Stanley, Einstein’s War Our second episode is a conversation with Matthew Stanley, professor of the history of science at Gallatin and author of the 2019 book Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Among the Vicious Nationalism of World War I. Stanley talks with host KC Trommer about the collaboration between Einstein and British astronomer AE Eddington that helped change our understanding of the universe.    

For this, our first episode, Criss Cross host KC Trommer speaks with NYU Gallatin faculty member Eugenia Kisin and NYU Gallatin senior Anna Van Dine about Overflow, an exhibition shown in The Gallatin Galleries in the summer of 2019.