Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

With our recording studio at KZSU temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, professor Robert Harrison has decided to open the Entitled Opinions Happy Hour Bar, offering up some small shots of poetry, on the house! This Happy Hour (our second of the season) features a few choice lyrics from Jethro Tull, a British rock band formed in Blackpool, Lancashire, in 1967.

This episode is a pre-recorded show that originally aired on March 4th, 2019 on Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source” podcast. In this conversation, Christopher Lydon and professor Robert Harrison discuss René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire. Additionally, professor Harrison also comments on social media, and recent advancements in biotechnology.

Professor Watkin is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. At its broadest, his research explores how people make sense of the world, and how they interact with ideas and positions different from their own. His previous publications include: "Phenomenology or Deconstruction?", "Difficult Atheism", and "French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in...

With our recording studio at KZSU temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, professor Robert Harrison has decided to open the Entitled Opinions Happy Hour Bar, offering up some small shots of poetry, on the house! We inaugurate our happy hour this week with a few choice lyrics from Jimi Hendrix. If you are interested in hearing more on Jimi Hendrix, please feel free to go back and listen...

This show is a recording of an online meeting that was held on Sunday April 5th, 2020. In this discussion professor Robert Harrison speaks on Boccaccio's Decameron, with particular emphasis on the following novelle: Second Day, story #5; Third Day, story #1 and story #10; Fourth Day, story #5; Fifth Day story #9; Sixth Day, story #1. Listeners are encouraged to read these novelle before listening...

In this episode, professor Robert Harrison reflects on the ways in which the present Coronavirus pandemic gives new resonance to Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death of 1348.  This monologue was recorded from Robert’s home. It will be followed in a day or two by the recording of a Zoom discussion of The Decameron that Robert held on April 5 with St...

In this episode, professor Harrison reflects on the symbolism of willows and their connection to thresholds. He includes discussions of Japanese willow stories, Algernon Blackwood, and poems by the pre-rafalite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti.

Pau is a graduate student in the ILAC (Iberian and Latin American cultures) department at Stanford University. He recently submitted his dissertation, and he will be graduating this year (2019). Pau has studied Philosophy, History, Greek Tragedy and Cinema. He has published three books about his travel experiences and one on the relation between archaeology and nationalism. Pau has lived in Englan...

Marisa Galvez is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. She specializes in medieval literature and culture, especially the lyric and romance of Continental Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Her scholarship focuses on such topics as crusade, performance, and the European lyric tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day. Her forthcoming book The Subject of Cru...

In this episode filmmaker and author Werner Herzog discusses his remarkable book “Of Walking in Ice”, first published in 1978. The audio in this show is a recording of a live event that took place at Stanford University on May 7, 2019. Discussing this book with Herzog are professors Robert Harrison and Amir Eshel. Werner […]

In this episode professor Harrison reads from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "Time of Useful Consciousness", published in 2012. Ferlinghetti turned 100 years old on March 24, 2019.

Kai Carlson-Wee grew up on the Minnesota prairie. He received his BA in English from the University of Minnesota and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first collection of poems, RAIL, was published by BOA Editions in 2018. He is currently the Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. Kai has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Lo...

Kai Carlson-Wee grew up on the Minnesota prairie. He received his BA in English from the University of Minnesota and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first collection of poems, RAIL, was published by BOA Editions in 2018. He is currently the Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. Kai has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Lo...

Note: This segment serves as a prologue to the extended conversation on the topic of "The American Road", which will air next week. In this episode, Kai speaks about how he first became a poet, and he reads a few poems from his recently published book "Rail".    Kai Carlson-Wee grew up on the Minnesota prairie. He received his BA in English from the University of Minnesota and his MFA in Creative...

In this monologue professor Robert Harrison reflects on the mysteries of the color white, and its various symbolic associations.

Donnie Hasseltine is a U.S. Marine Corps officer currently stationed in the Bay Area with the 23d Marine Regiment who served in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, the Joint Military Intelligence College, the Naval War College, and recently completed an Executive Master in Cybersecurity at Brown University. Hasseltine was a member of the winning team...

Jeremy Sabol has taught as a Lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE) on and off since 2003. Jeremy majored in physics and literature as an undergraduate, then received his Ph. D. in French. His dissertation examined the conceptual role of fiction in Descartes' physics and philosophy, as well as the impact of this use of fiction in later 17th-century French l...

In this 20 minute conversation, two Stanford undergraduates, Evan Kanji and Sammy Potter, interview our host professor Harrison on the topic of love. Evan and Sammy are the hosts of the KZSU show “Really, Bro?” If you are interested in knowing/hearing more of this podcast, the full list of episodes is available via the following link: […]

In this final episode of the season, our host Robert Harrison reflects on summer, the seasons, and the poetry of life on planet Earth.

Alison McQueen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.  Alison’s recently published book Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears...

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is also Professor by courtesy appointment in the Departments of History and Art & Art History. Turner’s research and writing explore media, technology and American cultural history. He is especially interested in how emerging media have shaped American life since World War II....

Quinn Slobodian is a historian of modern German and international history with a focus on North-South politics, social movements, and the intellectual history of neoliberalism. He is the author of Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany, and most recently Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Professor Slobodian is the editor of Comrades of Color: East G...

Yoshihiro Francis "Frank" Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human gove...

Professor Dan Edelstein works for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests in literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities. Most recently, he has completed a book manuscript on the history of natural and human rights from the wars of religion to the age of revolution (On the Spirit of Rights, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in fall 2018...

Priya Nelson is an editor at the University of Chicago Press. She acquires books for the Press’s long-standing and distinguished lists in anthropology and history. Exchange, value, religion, urban studies, media, epistemology, social theory, and ethnographic writing are topics of special interest, though anything that uses classic themes to investigate contemporary issues tends to catch her eye. P...