Office Hours

Dr. Shakuntala Rao is a professor of Communication Studies at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She completed her Ph. D. at my alma mater, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has taught classes in media ethics, popular culture, social media, and fundamentals of electronic media, and is a published author. Outside of academia, her background is wide-ranging, including working as...

Have you ever wondered why sound makes us feel? What about how film scores get made? Learn about all that and more in this edition of Office Hours! Our guest is Tim Huling, a screen scoring professor at the Berklee College of Music. Outside of teaching, he is a composer, orchestrator, and producer who works in music for film, TV, video games, the concert hall, and more. His credits include films s...

Dr. Kristina Steiner is a lifespan developmental psychologist who teaches at Denison University. She runs a research program that focuses on autobiographical memory and is especially interested in investigating the directive function of personal and shared memories across age groups and cultures, as well as the relationships between life story narratives and various outcomes, such as well-being.

I would like to welcome Alina Parker to our fourth episode of office hours. Alina is a full-time lecturer in the Writing Program and the Russian, Eurasian, and Polish Studies Program at UMass Amherst. Her research interests include postsocialism, Eastern Europe, political contention, and far-right politics. She is originally from Kharkiv, Ukraine, and I took a class on Russia's invasion of Ukraine...

I am thrilled to welcome İrvin Cemil Schick to our third episode of Office Hours, and first episode on religion, a timelessly controversial topic. İrvin is a historian who has taught at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Istanbul Şehir University. He has also held guest positions at Boston University, Sabancı University, Boğaziçi University, and the University of Ma...

I am excited to welcome Baron Pineda to our second episode on social media. Baron is a professor of cultural anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio, who specializes in human rights, indigenous peoples, and Latin America. He is the author of Shipwrecked Identities: Navigating Race on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast, as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals, including work that deals with the...

Hello, my name is Isaac Brickman, and welcome to the first episode of Office Hours. Each week, I will talk to a professor about a topic that is relevant to you. Each professor will have a different perspective on the topic. The goal is twofold. First, I want to make academia more accessible and applicable to everyone, including non-academic audiences. I also want to help dissolve the boundaries be...