Office Hours

In this episode, Professor Javier Corrales joins hosts Briana Bao ’28 and Anthony Xu ’29 to talk about Political Science, what makes teaching at Amherst special, Venezuela, a recent class trip to Colombia 👀, and, of course, Lady Gaga.

In this episode, Briana Bao ’28 and Rita Xing ’28 sit down together with Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans to discuss his academic journey, language learning, and teaching experience at Amherst College. He offers insights into his work on “Spanglish” as a curious linguistic phenomenon as well as his other career exploration as a TedEd storytel...

What is the potential of literature? How and why do we read, teach, and critique books? What do we learn about life when we bury our nose in a book? What are Professor Sanborn’s five book recommendations? All this and more are discussed in this episode, which invites the listener to relax, meditate, and feel. 

Although aid efforts are often seen as purely altruistic and humanitarian, they are usually influenced by forces that have the potential to both unite and divide communities. How do historical crises, like famine in the Ottoman Empire, inform us of modern humanitarian interventions? And are these efforts always truly helpful, or do they perpetuate divisions? Professor Ghazarian addresses these que...

Many people’s impression of the Russian language is just that it’s very difficult. It is, and more so, carries with it important literary traditions and a cultural spirit. In this episode, Briana Bao ’28 and Rita Xing ’28 sit down together with Howard M. and Martha P. Mitchell Professor of Russian Catherine A. Ciepiela (Amherst ’83) to discuss her academic journey, language learning, and teaching...

LJST: Let’s Just Sit Together? In this episode, Briana Bao ’28 and Rita Xing ’28 sit down together with Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought Youssef Ben Ismail to discuss his academic journey, language learning, and teaching experience during his first year at Amherst College. He offers insights in his past cultural and legal studies of China and his home country Tunisia,...

How did Greece and Rome come to be seen as the cultural ancestor of western Europe and Anglo-America, when a Roman would have called a Briton a barbarian? In this episode, Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellow Francesca Bellei sits down with Priscilla Lee ’25 to trace how empires use the figure of the mother to claim hegemonic power. Under a patriarchal and exclusionary view of family, a mother pas...

Language is a sign of culture. Objects are a sign of culture. Different languages encounter different objects, creating cultural exchange between the Spanish-speaking Iberian Peninsula and the Arab world of North Africa during the Medieval Ages. How do the image of Virgin Mary, Western colonialism, and Arabic root words influence culture?  In this episode, Briana Bao ’28 and Rita Xing ’28 sit down...

Are you ever confused about the thunderous laughter reverberating through Seeley Mudd? Are your dreams infiltrated by math problems? Do you have math competition trauma? In this episode, Briana Bao ’28 and Rita Xing ’28 sit down with Associate Professor of Mathematics Ivan Contreras to discuss the highs and lows of his “complicated” but ultimately loving relationship with mathematics. The episode...

Baby bonuses, enhanced parental leave, and childcare access are public policies aimed at slowing the declining birth rate —  but by themselves, they are unlikely to change anyone’s mind about having children. Faced with an aging population’s need for health care and pensions, how can policymakers realistically intervene? Is the birth rate an effective policy target in the first place? In this epis...

Grafting is an essential agricultural technique for making trees bear sweet-tasting fruit. In the ancient Mediterranean, it was the only known way for humans to modify nature. The graft, then, was and continues to be a prompt to rethink our relationship with the nonhuman world. As Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Mattthew Westermayer asks, “What is nature insofar that a tree is so malleabl...

When Livius Andronicus put on a play “in the Greek style” and translated the Odyssey into Latin, Roman literature was born — at least, that’s the story later Romans liked to tell themselves. But is this story true? And why did the Romans want to position themselves as the cultural descendants of classical Greece? In this episode, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Niek Janssen sits down with...

How is Blackness shared? Though it is obviously important to recognize different experiences of Blackness, Professor of Black Studies Carol Bailey believes “there is more to be gained from acknowledging what Black people share.” Beginning with a passage from A Brief History of Seven Killings by Jamaican author Marlon James, Professor Bailey’s conversation with host Priscilla Lee ’25 and Evelyn Chi...

Galaxies are like communities: Stars cycle through life, leave matter behind for future generations, interact with other galaxies, and come together to build communities bigger than themselves. At least, that’s how Assistant Professor of Astronomy Mia de los Reyes likes to frame it — a framing she contrasts with the somewhat violent and imperialistic terms scientists have traditionally used to des...

Can videogames be poetic? In this recorded live show, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson chats with Host Priscilla Lee ’25 and Evelyn Chi ’25 about the short, unusual videogames that he and others make—which he calls “game poems”—as a lyric practice. With a live playthrough, audience Q&A, and discussion of Magnuson’s new book, Game Poems (Amherst College Press, 2023).  Episode notes and...

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have such different histories, cultures, and racializations, not to mention the vast heterogeneity within each group. Why do we put them together in #AAPIHeritageMonth, or study them together in an AAPI literature course? Should we separate them in our scholarship and activism? Visiting Assistant Professor Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito and Priscilla Lee ’25 interrog...

Stories of post-race piazza brawls, saints falling down stairs, jockey bribery, Etruscan cowboys, terracotta workshop mishaps, and other historical shenanigans are told by archaeologist Nora Donoghue in this fun, end-of-year episode all about the Italian city of Siena (which is way cooler than Florence).  Episode notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1badNruC9mEk0PrpWSjf3n86W2RFBuY2z7L0L0YSEhj...

Zillow-scrolling, interior design Pinterest, house hunting shows… Our living spaces are so important to us because they are an expression of our identities. To apply this principle to history, studying houses can shed light on the societies and values of people who lived in them: How much did privacy matter? Did business belong at home? What was their hierarchy of room subdivision needs? Archaeolo...

Content Warning: Mentions of sexual violence from 21:45 onward.  The patriarchal families of ancient Rome—headed by a father with extreme authority—may seem like an inflexible social structure, but there are exceptions to every rule: Foreigners, sex workers, and enslaved people did not have access to the legal institution of marriage, and formed families beyond the bounds of convention. Their stor...

What does it mean to be a writer in exile, and more specifically, how does that affect the writing and the language? As a Russian émigré in Berlin and later the United States, Vladimir Nabokov worked with publishers in multiple countries and languages throughout his career. In this episode, Assistant Professor Luke Parker discusses the multilingual joys of reading Nabokov, and the many layers of h...

As the Soviets forged ahead to modern and socialist art, Russian exiles in Paris and Berlin looked to young artists — like Vladimir Nabokov — to continue in the Russian tradition. Nabokov, whose father was a prominent politician in the short-lived Russian Republic, did begin his writing career in Russian émigré journals and publishing houses, but his eventual success came from the English-language...

DNA is not a static thing. It is constantly being folded and unfolded, a process which explains why genetically identical twins aren’t actually identical, and how our cells specialize into their various functions. Sit in on office hours as Amherst's Associate Professor of Physics Ashley Carter breaks down the mechanics of DNA folding, as well as the applications of this research in nanoengineering...

In his forthcoming article, Amherst’s Associate Professor and Chair of English Christopher Grobe calls what happened at the the January 6th capitol riots a “weird coexistence of violence and play.” How is it possible that violence and play can coexist? And, what, exactly, does “play” mean, in this context? Sit in on “office hours” with Prof. Grobe to talk about play, performance, theatricality, im...