Staying With The Question

The hosts chat with Dr. Duncan-O'Neill about her recent book _Art Against Censorship: Honoré Daumier, Comedy, and Resistance in 19th-Century France_ (2024, Manchester University Press). This book explores how the famous caricaturist Honoré Daumier used comedy and art to resist censorship in 19th-century France, even depicting 17th-century theater scenes during periods of political oppression....

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the Arts & Humanities Forum at the University of Oklahoma presents the fourth and final Trandsiciplinary Research Panel exploring "Dirt." This panel is entitled "Dirty Dirt: Thinking with Pollution, Pesticides, Noise, and Gossip." It features the research of OU Faculty Andreea Marculescu (MLLL), Peter Soppel...

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the Arts & Humanities Forum at the University of Oklahoma presents the third of four Transdisciplinary Research Panels. This panel is entitled "Red Dirt Place-Making: Thinking with Community, Home, and Identity." It features the research of OU Faculty Allyson Shortle (Political Science), Rilla Askew (English), Bryan B...

The hosts chat with Dr. Alpers about his recent book _Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America (2024, Rutgers University Press).  The 1970's are frequently seen as a watershed period, an era from which sources of 21st-century American culture began to flow. But the 1970's are also seen as a particularly backward-looking time, seen by many critics as morbidly nostal...

The hosts chat with Dr. Condren about his recent book An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (2024, Cornell University Press).  Eisenstein directed some of the twentieth century's most important films, from the early classic of montage, Battleship Potemkin , to his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible . Alongside these, however, the Soviet filmmaker also toiled over a c...

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the Arts & Humanities Forum at the University of Oklahoma presents the second of four Transdisciplinary Research Panels. This panel is entitled "What Dirt is Not: Thinking with Loess, Shell, Sand, and Dust." It features the research of OU faculty Tamar Zinguer (Architecture), Lynn Soreghan (Geosciences), Asa Randall (...

In celebration of the Forum 2025-26 Annual Theme "Dirt," the OU Arts & Humanities Forum presents the first of four Transdisciplinary Research Panels. This panel is entitled "Dirt as Soil: Thinking with Germination, Cultivation, Plant Life and Carbon Capture." It features the research of OU Faculty Cathleen Faubert (School of Visual Arts),Annabel Ipsen (Sociology), Caitlin H...

The hosts chat with Dr. Grinberg about her recent book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (2024, Princeton University Press). This book follows an influential group of critics and writers in the post-WWII period who forged a pugilistic writing style as distinctively American, Jewish, and masculine. Profiling important figures like Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lion...

The hosts chat with Dr. Sturtevant about her recent book It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (2024, University of Texas Press). This book examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around nonmarital pregnancy in the 1960s and 70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks,...

In celebration of the Forum Annual 2023-24 Theme "Visible," the OU Arts & Humanities Forum welcomed Dr. Catherine Clark (MIT) for a Marquee Lecture in the "Paris Visible" Distinguished Lecture Series. This lecture reflects on Catherine Clark’s longstanding engagement with the photographic history of Paris. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the municipality invested heavi...

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Historian Jennifer J. Davis about her new book Bad Subjects: Libertine Lives in the French Atlantic 1619-1814 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). In this book that spans continents, Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to pla...

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Professor of Musicology Jennifer Saltzstein about her new book Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this book, Saltzstein offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessin...

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Japanese Professor Joshua Frydman about his new book The Japanese Myths: A Guide to Gods, Heroes and Spirits . This book is a smart and succinct guide to the rich tradition of Japanese mythology, from the earliest recorded legends of Izanagi and Izanami, their divine offspring and the creation of Japan, to medieval tales of vengeful ghosts, through to the modern-day...

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU English Professor Joseph Mansky about his new book Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This book traces the practice of libel across law, literature, and culture, outlining a viral and often virulent media ecosystem. It shows that our present-day preoccupation with free speech and fake news...

Host Kim Marshall talks to OU Philosopher Dr. Sherri Irvin about her new book Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art .  Contemporary art can appear to be a space unencumbered by rules, where paintings can be hung upside down, instructions to hum are considered art, piles of candy invite you to eat one, and bananas rot on the floor of a museum. However, as Dr. Irvin discusses in this episode, making...

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Musicologist Dr. Michael Lee about his recently published book Music in the Horror Films of Val Lewton . Written in an accessible and engaging voice, this book offers a fascinating look at the role of the RKO Studio’s Music Department in contributing to the revolutionary horror films of director Val Lewton between 1942 and 1946. In an era of big monster movies, Lewt...

Host Kim Marshall interviews award-winning American novelist and short story  Oklahoma author Rilla Askew (associate professor of English at OU) about her new novel Prize for the Fire, the harrowing tale of Early Modern Reformist and writer Anne Askew, who was burned as a heretic in 1546.

Order is all around us, like air. Before we are even aware of our surroundings, we have entered a humanly-ordered world. Order can be used to punish creativity and keep people in their place. But it is also order that guarantees the rule of law, a fair shot, and democratic governance. Host Kim Marshall talks to OU scholars Sherri Irvin , Jermaine Thibodaux , Katie Schumaker ,and Wanda Katja Lieber...

Can we train our senses to listen better, observe more closely, and savor the world around us? In this episode, host Kim Marshall talks to OU Faculty Roxanne Lyst, Jennifer Saltzstein, Konstantinos Karathanasis, and Marwin Begay from the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts. In this discussion covering modern dance, medieval love songs, electro-accoustic composition, and Indigenous printmakin...

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Historian Dr. Kathryn Schumaker about her recently published book Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s. For transcripts and show notes, see our website . 

Host Kim Marshall talks to OU Historian Dr. Adam Malka about his recently published book The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation. For transcripts and show notes, see our website . 

Kim sits down with Marwin Begaye, OU Associate Professor of Painting and Printmaking in the School of Visual Arts. Begay (Diné/Navajo) discusses his current monumental-scale printmaking project "Keyah" - where fragmented connections to land and community are acknowledged and the path toward healing and relationality are inscribed through the feet of a dancer who becomes the agent of prin...

How can we do better scholarship in the arts and humanities, and even in science, if we start by listening carefully to others, and valuing what they have to say? By… making kin? Host Kim Marshall talks to OU scholars Zoe Sherinian, Sam Duwe, and Laurel Smith about the innovative reciprocal methodologies they are using to answer questions about the deep past, social inequality in the present, and...

Kim sits down with OU Archaeology Professor Sam Duwe to talk about Dr. Duwe's new book Tewa Worlds: An Archaeological History of Being and Becoming in the Pueblo Southwest.

Kim sits down with OU Native American Studies Professor Farina King to talk about Dr. King's book Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School.