The Humanities Pod

History wrapped up in song: “Singing Freedom” with Tsitsi Jaji, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and Ed Baptist. Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, poet and associate professor of English at Duke Tsitsi Jaji, and Cornell professor of history Ed Baptist, talk with Annette about 'Singing Freedom,' a multi-layered collaboration with leading Black American composers and performers to create musical responses to materials in the Freedom on the Move archive. They talk about how music might give voice to those self-liberators and their stories, exploring ways the creative arts might grapple with racism in the past and present across literary and musical genres. This episode was recorded in September 2021 by Bert Odom Reed and produced by Eric Harvey. We are grateful to Shawn E. Okpebholo and Rhiannon Giddens for permission to reproduce their music. Excerpts heard in this episode are from: Rhiannon Giddens, “At the Purchaser's Option,” performed by Rhiannon Giddens from the album “Freedom Highway” (2017); Shawn E. Okpebholo, “The Rain” from “Two Black Churches” (poem by Marcus Amaker), performed by Will Liverman, baritone, and Paul Sánchez, piano from the album “Lord, How Come Me Here” (2022); and Shawn Okpebholo, “Oh, Freedom,” sung by Will Liverman, with Paul Sánchez (piano) from the album “Steal Away” (2014).  Lucy Fitz Gibbon has recently taken a full-time position at Bard College and Conservatory.

Angel Nugroho and Joanne Lee, two undergraduate students from Cornell's Humanities Scholars Program, sit down with Paul Fleming to discuss the fraught legacy of Goldwin Smith, Cornell's first academic star. Through collaborative archival research, Angel and Joanne share their unique perspectives on Goldwin Smith's misogyny against the backdrop of women's burgeoning access to public, academic, and legal spaces in the Victorian Finger Lakes region.

This third episode of the Rural Poetics podcast series features poetry author Tim Earley, visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Earley's dynamic range of diction mixes the academic vocabulary of continental theory with his own roots of Appalachian vernacular English. Tim's work directly confronts the class hierarchies of U.S. poetry communities, giving audiences a language to better understand the complexity of contemporary rural life.

Ed Baptist, Cornell history professor, joins Paul and Annette to discuss the Freedom on the Move database and related pedagogical projects. This work by Baptist and many other scholars, educators, and volunteers aims to shift the narrative surrounding slavery in America, bringing together tens of thousands of newspaper “wanted” ads for freedom seekers. These ads inadvertently bear witness to the names, lives, and personalities of self-liberators who otherwise have been effaced from history—while also highlighting the complicity of mainstream newspapers and their subscribers in attempting to subjugate “runaway property.”    

This episode features Nancy Bereano, founder of Ithaca's groundbreaking, award-winning lesbian and feminist press, Firebrand Books (1985-2000). Speaking with Rural Poetics host, Alec Pollak, Bereano  reflects on the heyday of feminist small-press publishing and her role bringing up notable authors such as Alison Bechdel, Leslie Feinberg, and Audre Lorde.

In this episode, author Nikki Wallschlaeger reads 11 poems from her latest published collection of poetry-- Waterbaby (2021, Copper Canyon Press). Nikki also speaks with Rural Poetics host Marty Cain, to contextualize her work, sharing insights into her writing process and geographic inspirations.

2020-21 ‘Fabrication' Fellows, Adin Lears, assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Anthony Lovenheim Irwin, scholar of Asian religions, engage in a conversation that ranges from creatures and creaturehood in Piers Plowman to craft and construction in Thai Buddhism, finding common ground in questions of spirituality and belief, language and craft, as they consider the ethics and poetics of ‘Fabrication.'

Kate Manne, 2018-19 “Authority” Faculty Fellow and associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University takes listeners behind the pages of her latest book “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.” Discussing concepts such as “himpathy,” “mansplaining,” and “gaslighting” Kate shares stories from her writing process, earlier philosophical roots, and where she finds the strength to keep fighting on behalf of women and girls today.

Kimberly Kay Lamm, 2020-21 Society Fellow and associate professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, explores issues of race, sex and class through the self-fashioning of Black women. From writers of the Harlem Renaissance to visual artists of today, Lamm unfurls the physical and psychic legacies of fashion and fabrication as both display and self-protection in a hostile world.

Georgia Frank, 2020-21 Society Fellow and Charles A. Dana Professor of Religion at Colgate University, takes us back to the first 600 years of Christianity to explore the power of song and participatory performances in reenacting and fabricating emotions. Georgia shares insights from her research on bodily experience in ancient Mediterranean religions, including methods and metaphors by which early Christians shaped a collective identity.

In this follow up episode on Indigenous dispossession and land-grant universities, Paul Fleming and Jon Parmenter sit down with Professor Michael Witgen, professor of History and American Culture and twice former director of Native American Studies at the University of Michigan. In this segment, Michael provides insight into how non-removal treaties incrementally restricted traditional lands and life-ways for Anishinaabe while benefiting white settlers throughout the 19th century. Beyond his academic work, Michael also shares personal insights on generations of Native resilience in the Great Lakes from his position as a direct lineal descendant of a key Ojibwe signatory to the 1842 treaty that soon became one of the financial engines for establishing Cornell University. In light of this, he discusses how land-grant universities might begin to address this history.

In this premiere episode, Paul Fleming sits down with Cornell associate professor of history, Jon Parmenter, to learn more about his new research. Jon's blog post, "Flipped Scrip, Flipping the Script, the Morrill Act of 1862, Cornell University and the Legacy of 19th Century Indigenous Dispossession,” adds to the emerging conversations on America's land-grant universities to tell the early story of Cornell University.