Series
Public Thinker
In this interview series, public scholars talk about how they found their path and how they communicate to a wide audience.
Editors: B. R. Cohen & Ben Platt
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Adventures Newly Narrated: Jessica Francis Kane on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Lost Adventure
“There is always a job to be done in Fitzgerald’s novels, and I admire that. I try to write that way, too.”
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“If a Woman Commanded Fire”: Talking Historical Stoves and Affordable Energy with Joyce Chaplin
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“The Interdisciplinary Nature of Food Is Now Un-ignorable”: Alicia Kennedy on Food Writing, Food Security, and Food Justice
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“Courage or Foolhardiness”: Talking Aimé Césaire with Alex Gil
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We Are the Authors of the Story of Citizenship: Daisy Hernández on America’s Myth
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“Living in and as Refusal”: Eric Stanley on Anti-Trans/Queer Violence
“While ungovernability takes many paths, here it approximates living in and as refusal.”
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Literary Experiments and Black Southern Time Travel with Kiese Laymon
“My reckoning with the Black South was an attempt to give integrity and texture to my belief that I was an Afrikan with a ‘k.’”
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“Remaindered Life”: Durba Mitra in Conversation with Neferti Tadiar
“The survival of the world depends on the gendered work of subsistence and reproduction, carried out predominantly by women in the global South.”
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Nostalgia’s Empire: A Conversation with Grafton Tanner and Johny Pitts
Nostalgia is both a threat and a refuge.
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“To Reach across Boundaries”: Laleh Khalili Talks Solidarity and Global Trade
“It is precisely because we are unlike, or we haven’t had the same experiences, that solidarity can be built.”
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Public Thinker: Ruha Benjamin on Uprooting Oppression and Seeding Justice
“Keep your cosmetic change, if you’re making no attempt to deal with the underlying practices that perpetuate harm.”
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“I Speak Only for Myself”: Anahid Nersessian on Keats, Feminism, and Poetry
“One of the things that is interesting about Keats’ letters to Fanny Brawne is that you can’t infer a damn thing that’s happened between them.”
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Public Thinker: Jaipreet Virdi on Disability History & Deaf Futures
“Disabled people have long made their own hacks.”
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“At the End of Everything”: Talking with Shannon Mattern
“My first book was used by actual librarians, planners, architects. I realized, wow I can do work that matters beyond the academy.”
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Public Thinker: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on How to Upend Settler Colonialism
“One of my objectives in writing the book was a plea to immigrants to not become settlers.”
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“The Good of the Whole”: Talking Weaving, Coding, and Indigenous Scholarship with Rhiannon Sorrell
”When you work here, you work in the interest of the people in the community, not just your own personal goals.”
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Public Thinker: Lara Putnam Wants You to Knock on Your Neighbor’s Door
“Campaigns matter in part because of who meets whom, about the social networks that are shaped by that campaign as well as shaping it.”
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“Just Use the Telephone, Please”: Hannah Zeavin on the Power of Teletherapy
“You can have really intense intimacy over distance, sometimes only because distance is there.”
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Public Thinker: Imani Perry on How to Understand “Souths Plural”
“At the end of the day, the America project was about an encounter with abundance that was responded to with greed and brutality.”
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Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
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Habits of Mind: John Warner on Teaching Writing
“You fall short and then you wonder, ‘what could I do differently next time that gets us a little bit closer?’ I love that process.”
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Why Does the State Allow Environmental Inequalities to Persist? Talking with Jill Lindsey Harrison
“What state and federal environmental regulatory agencies in the US have not yet done is reform the way agency staff make decisions.”
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Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds
“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”
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Public Thinker: Chawne Kimber on Constructing Quilts and Speaking History
“You cannot talk about race without talking about cotton. The materials that I use are desperately important as a layer of meaning in the work that I make.”
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Public Thinker: Merve Emre Throws a Party for Different Readers
“One way to think about the act of annotating is that you are that meddlesome party gossip, telling the reader how to draw connections between the different parts of the text.”
