Office Hours

This week on Office Hours, we sat down with poet and English Professor Russell Price, whose work focuses on the exploration of identity through writing. We discussed carving an identity through art, the Chicago poetry scene, and the political power of poetry.

This week, we sat down with Performance Studies professor Marcela Fuentes, whose research examines the use of embodied performance as a tool for activism, both online and offline. In our post-inauguration interview, we discussed Women’s Marches around the world, the role of social media in protest, and moving forward in the next four years of Trump’s presidency.

This week, we sat down with Prof. Al Tillery, an associate chair of the Political Science Department who specializes in American politics, including how it interacts with media and public opinion. Prof. Tillery broke down the 2016 presidential election for us, explaining how demographics, the Obama legacy and the electoral college have shaped 2016 into more surprising electoral season than most.

Following the Chicago Cubs’ historic World Series win on Wednesday, November 2, we sat down with English professor and lifelong Cubs fan Bill Savage. Savage teaches a class called Baseball in American Narrative and wrote a Cubs column for ESPN called “The View from Section 416.” In our Tuesday interview, we talked to Savage about the historical significance of the Cubs’ win, the Cubs’ place in Chicago sports, and why he doesn’t believe in curses.

Office Hours features interviews with Northwestern professors about current events. This week, we revisited an interview conducted in May with Dan McAdams, a psychology professor who wrote The Atlantic's June cover story, "The Mind of Donald Trump." McAdams, who also analyzed former president George W. Bush in his 2011 book "George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream: A Psychological Portrait," spoke to us about Donald Trump's personal narrative, his personality traits, and what attracts voters to him. Madeline Fox, Jeremy Margolis and Isabel Robertson contributed to this podcast.

This week, we sat down with Weinberg Prof. Laurel Harbridge Yong, a political science professor who specializes in the lack of bipartisan agreement in American politics. Prof. Harbridge Yong discussed the history of partisan conflict and walked us through where it comes from, as well as how it affects people's lives even beyond politics.

This week, we sat down with Jerry Goldman, the retired former Northwestern professor who founded Oyez.org, an online archive of U.S. Supreme Court audio. In light of the 2016 Supreme Court session opening Monday, we talked to Goldman about the role of the court, his inspirations for Oyez and more.

This week, we sat down with Weinberg Profs. Jeffrey Winters and Jordan Gans-Morse to discuss the “Panama Papers,” or the 11.5 million documents detailing financial and client information about offshore companies administered by Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The documents, leaked to journalists more than a year ago, started making waves in early April when those journalists started publishing their first stories about the information in the papers. Since then, the Icelandic prime minister has resigned and several other political leaders have found themselves in hot water as a result of the documents’ contents. Winters, who studies elites and the wealthy, and Gans-Morse, who focuses on corruption, walked us through what, exactly, firms like Mossack Fonseca do, as well as the impact of these documents’ release.

Welcome to the first edition of Office Hours, a Daily Northwestern podcast in which co-hosts Madeline Fox and Jeremy Margolis sit down with Northwestern professors to discuss current and historical events. For our first episode, we sat down with McCormick Prof. Buckley Crist, who in 1978 received the first bomb sent by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Crist, who was in his fifth year of teaching at the time, received the bomb after it was found with his name as the return addressee in a parking lot on the University of Illinois at Chicago’s campus. It was then delivered to him at the Technological Institute, where it detonated. Crist discusses the 1978 bomb, its aftermath, and his memories of the Unabomber’s nearly 18-year bombing campaign.