Humanities on the High Plains

In 1980, when he was a high-school freshman in Canyon, Texas, Jeff Roche opened up his school newspaper and saw he was one of only seven students out of about 500 who voted for Carter rather than Reagan in that year's mock Presidential election. This was the moment that Roche – now a history professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio – first began to realize that the Texas Panhandle is truly diff...

Our guest this episode is Tyler Mills, an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College's Writing Institute and an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in – among many other publications – The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Kenyon Review . She joins us to discuss her new mixed-media memoir, The Bomb Cloud , published in 2024 by Unbound Editions Press . The book takes its title from an "unauthorize...

In March 2023, The Canadian Record — the weekly newspaper of rural Canadian, TX, population 2,300 — suspended publication after 130 years in print. Ryan's guests this episode are Laurie Ezzell Brown, longtime editor and publisher of The Record, and Heather Courtney, the award-winning director and producer of the 2023 documentary short For the Record , which streams online from May 6th to July 31st...

Before he was a MacArthur Genius or a Booker Prize-winner, George Saunders was a songwriter, an oil-field worker, and a slaughterhouse "knuckle-puller," not to mention an MA student at what was then West Texas State University. In this in-depth interview, Amarillo College's Chris Hudson joins me, Ryan Brooks, as we speak with the author of Lincoln in the Bardo , Tenth of December , CivilWarLand in...

The history of public media is the history of fidelity to an idea: access to public education is "not only a service but a right." On this episode we're joined by Dr. Josh Shepperd, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Josh describes how this democrat...

Ryan's guests this episode are Dr. Timothy M. Foster, former WT prof and currently a Spanish teacher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and Dr. John Beusterien, Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Tim and John come on the podcast to discuss their article, "The Thirsty Llano Estacado: The Manuel Maés Ballad Corpus," published in 2022 in The Great Plains Quarterly. This piece includes a thoro...

Our guest this episode is WT history professor Dr. Chelsea Ball, author of "'I Oppose the ERA, but I Do Approve of Equal Rights for Women': Gender and Politics in the Aftermath of the Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the U.S. West." This piece can be found in The North American West in the Twenty-First Centur y (2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink and published by the University of Nebraska Pres...

Ryan's guest on this episode is Dr. Julia Schleck, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Schleck joins us to discuss her book, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism , published in January 2022 as part of the University of Nebraska Press's "Provocations" series. The book critiques traditional defenses of academic...

In this episode, Ryan speaks with his WT colleague Dr. Timothy Paul Bowman, historian and author of You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, a Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservativism, published in 2022 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Bowman's book tells the story of Wayne Woodward, who in 1975 was fired from his job as an English teacher at La Plata Junior High in Hereford, T...

On this episode, Ryan is joined by two of his WT colleagues — Dr. Nathan Howell, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Dr. Erik Crosman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences — and Dr. Darryl Birkenfeld, executive director of the nonprofit organization, Ogallala Commons. We discuss anthropologist Lucas Bessire's Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains , a Nationa...

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Joel Zapata to discuss his essay "The South-by-Southwest Borderlands' Chicana/o Uprising: the Brown Berets, Black and Brown Alliances, and the Fight against Police Brutality in West Texas." The piece emerged out of Zapata's involvement with the groundbreaking Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project and appears in Civil Rights in Black and Brown:...

On this episode, Ryan is joined by Mark. A. Lause, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West (Verso, 2017). Taking its title from a major strike led by ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle in 1883, the book traces the broader history of post-Civil War labor radicalism and third-party insurgen...

Ryan sits down with two of his WT colleagues, Dr. Amy Von Lintel, Professor of Art History, and Dr. Bonnie Roos, Professor of English, who join him to discuss their new book, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West , forthcoming in February 2022 from Texas A&M University Press. The book seeks to "recenter" Abstract Expressionism by examining how this NYC-based mo...

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Eugenio Di Stefano, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Di Stefano is the author of The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Culture and Theory in the Postdictatorial Era , published in 2018 by the University of Texas Press. The Vanishing Frame shows that as Latin American culture has become increasi...

How can educators cultivate self -cultivation in their students? How can they maintain an intimate connection between their scholarly research, what they teach, and how they teach? How can they encourage students to find common ground in a period of intense political division? In this episode, Ryan discusses these and other challenges with Dr. Laura J. Mueller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at...

In 2019, after a nearly 40-year absence, affiliated minor-league baseball returned to Amarillo with the debut of the Sod Poodles, a Class AA Padres affiliate who won the Texas League title and drew over 400,000 fans in their first season of play. (This despite a team name that infuriated many locals — reportedly it's obscure pioneer slang for "prairie dogs.") As Brian M. Ingrassia suggests, howeve...

For this episode, Ryan is joined by Justin A. Joyce, Research Director for President Dwight McBride at the New School in New York City, Managing Editor of the James Baldwin Review , and the author of Gunsligning Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law . The paperback edition of the book, originally published in 2018, is now available from Manchester University Press....

In this episode, Ryan is joined by four of his WT colleagues: Dr. Alex Hunt, Dr. Tim Bowman, Dr. Ashley Pinkham, and Dr. Christopher Macaulay. Together we discuss Sarah Smarsh's bestselling 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth . Smarsh was born in 1980 and grew up poor in southern Kansas, the daughter of generations of wheat farmers on one s...

Ryan's guests for this episode are Heather J. Allen, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Mississippi, and Andrew R. Reynolds, Professor of Spanish at West Texas A&M University. Allen and Reynolds are co-editors of the collection Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media , published in December 2018 by the University of Arizona Press. The collection provid...

In this episode, Ryan speaks with Christopher R. Martin, Professor of Communication Studies and Digital Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa. Martin is the author of No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class ( Cornell University Press /ILR Press), named one of Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Titles of 2019. No Longer Newsworthy traces the decline of...