Love & Its Discontents

"i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)" – e.e. cummings Welcome to this episode with the historian Prof. Dr. Sarah Cramsey where we talk about love as that invisible work that constitutes the bulk of human history. Prof. Dr. Sarah Cramsey is the Special Chair for Central European Studies at Leiden University, an Assistant Professor of Judaism & Diaspora Studies, and Director of the Austri...

Today I'm joined by Yusuf Jones. We're digging into the way Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we love. Yusuf Jones is a visionary AI Prompt Engineer/Architect and Technology Integrationist at the forefront of the AI revolution in mental health, community development, and spiritual technology. Facebook: @yusuf.journeyman.jones Instagram: @ yusuf.is .just.dust

In this episode, we explore love in the new adaptation of James Clavell's Shōgun with John Austin. John Austin is an interactive designer, independent researcher, author, filmmaker, cultural critic, and entrepreneur. For over fifteen years, he has worked in augmented reality/virtual reality. Between 2007 and 2009 he divided his time living between the US and Japan where he helped found Autism Fami...

Join me for a deep conversation on love in times and aftermath of traumatic historical events. How do our history and heritage make us and how do they shape the way we love? Focusing on the unique work of poetic theater, A Short History of Anger, about the genocide in Smyrna and the massive movements of peoples across borders of modern Turkey and Greece, we dig into things that help us live meanin...

Join me in this unique conversation on love spells and potions with Dr. Amila Buturovic. Buturovic was born in Sarajevo. She works at the Dept of Humanities and Religious Studies at York University. Her interest lies in the cultural history of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans, specifically Bosnia. Her major works are Stone Speaker: Bosnian Tombstones, Landscape and Identity in the Poetry of Mak Di...

In this episode, we delve into the amazing worlds of the African-American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. We go in-depth on her masterpiece Beloved but also trace the theme of love throughout her oeuvre. Alice Sundman is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English, at Stockholm University. Her book Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022) explores the creation and presenta...

Join me for a truly unique and rewarding conversation with Professor Mieke Bal about one of the most captivating stories of all time, the story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife. Bal is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of more than 40 books, many films, and video installations. Her work is often course l...

Conversation with Mohsin Hamid the globally loved author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Exit West, and many more novels.

In this special episode, I interview my old teacher and mentor Ishrat Lindblad, an expert on Shakespearean drama. But we also get personal on the way love shaped us.

Shakespeare's Othello is one of the most tragic heroes, famous for his excessive jealousy. And yet, he thought of himself as not easily jealous? In this episode, we find out how split he was and what ruined love for him.

Shakespeare's Othello is one of the most tragic heroes, famous for his excessive jealousy. And yet, he thought of himself as not easily jealous? In this episode, we find out how split he was and what ruined love for him.

Can romantic love and friendship exist at the same time? Find out in this reflection on this classical romantic drama that shaped us as teenagers.

Join me and Dr. Paul Jaussen as we dig into Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, one the most influential stories of all time. Let us see what it says about love.

Everyone knows the story of Frankenstein and his Creation, the Wretch, the Monster. But do they? Let's dig into it from a different angle. What if it is, ultimately, a love story?

Let's follow the Sufi path to discover what love is in Islamic mysticism and what diverse expressions it found in some of the key figures that defined it. Our guest is Filip Almansour Holm the host of the erudite and fun podcast Let's Talk Religion ( https://www.youtube.com/ @LetsTalkReligion )

Islam is one of the biggest religions in the world and at its core is The Holy Qur'an. What does it say about love? In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Celine Ibrahime on a journey through the holy text of Islam to explore the multitude of ways in which it evokes, defines, and prescribes love.

What if there was no tomorrow? What would that do to love? Is love eternal? Find out in this fun episode on the classic romantic comedy "Groundhog Day."

Join me as I dig into Jean Rhys' amazing novel Wide Sargasso Sea and explore the relationship between love and madness and the harms of colonialism.

In this episode, we introduce the burning love and the debilitating madness of Bertha a.k.a. "madwoman in the attic." Jean Rhy's prequel to the classic Jane Eyre takes us all the way to the Caribbean and explores how he came to marry a creole woman who would later come to go crazy, be locked up in his attic, and eventually burn down his estate.

Join us for an in-depth conversation on love, marriage, and the constraints of the Victorian age in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with Dr. Lisa Ann Robertson. Dr. Robertson is an Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century British Literature with expertise in Romanticism and eighteenth-century literature and culture at the University of South Dakota.

Jane Eyre, the classical Bildungsroman, established some of the key definitions of love and marriage that still affect the way we think about modern Western love. In this episode, we lay some grounds for future interviews on rebellious love in the Victorian period.

In this episode, we are joined by Prof. Peter Adamson, from the podcast History of Philosophy without any Gaps, to discuss the philosophy of love in presocratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought.

What was love for the father of Western philosophy, Plato? Why do we think of "platonic love" as divorced from erotic feelings?

How does a sheet with a small hole make people fall in love? Is it a blessed or a cursed sheet and how long does the magic last? Find out in this episode on Salman Rushdie's magical realist novel Midnight's Children.

How do we define love? Is love that which kicks in after that initial chemistry has faded? Is love that which happens between the extremes of spirituality and materiality? Join us in a conversation with Dr. Lucy Durneen from the University of Cambridge as we discuss these issues using Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."