The Hauenstein Center Collection

Gleaves Whitney is joined by Winston Elliott, Editor-and-Chief and President of the "Imaginative Conservative", and the Free Enterprise Institute, to discuss Homer's "The Odyssey".

#85: Amity Shlaes by The Hauenstein Center at Grand Valley State University

Author Steve Luxenberg discusses with us his new book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation.

Author David Roll comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss his newest book George Marshall: Defender of the Republic.

Danielle Allen, bestselling author of the book Our Declaration comes to our Beyond Aporia podcast to talk about the origins of the Declaration of Independence, and what it means for the country today.

President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss the current political situation in Washington, as well as the origins of one of our most beloved documents, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Bestselling author Lynne Olson comes to our new Common Ground Podcast, Beyond Aporia, to speak about her books Last Hope Island and Those Angry Days.

This week, we hear from Gerald Russello, editor of The University Bookman, a publication founded in 1960 by the traditionalist conservative Russell Kirk. The University Bookman, like most conservative magazines and journals, is a site where, implicitly or explicitly, there is a debate about what the word “conservative” even means. A couple weeks ago, The Washington Post profiled a number of magazi...

This week, we hear from Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Coleman is a public historian. As you’ll hear in her lecture, her work is to take the findings, the interpretations, of academic historians and bring them to life for the public—as she says, to make the work relevant to contemporary audiences. She says in her talk that, inevitably, new generations...

This week, we hear from Maggie Doherty, a critic and teacher at Harvard University. Maggie writes often for publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and N Plus One; her criticism often focuses on writers and feminists around the middle of the 20th century—familiar names are Mary McCarthy and Kate Millet. Maggie’s literary criticism blends questions of politics into her wr...

This week, we hear from Sophie Pinkham, a writer and academic who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics. Sophie has recently published some review essays, primarily in The Nation, about the Russian Revolution and the legacy of communism in the West. One of her main concerns is the manner in which a given historian’s politics will affect their reading of the history and legacy o...

This episode focuses on the role of the public intellectual, or even the academic, in cultural debate. We hear from Dan Drezner about the difference between public intellectuals and thought leaders, and what happens when we have too many of one over the other. In our conversation, Dan addresses the importance of expertise in cultural debate and discourse; he considers why respect for expertise see...

This week, as an installment in our end-of-year retrospective series of episodes, we’re going to hear from Jonny Thakkar as well as from Cate Zaloom, co-founding editor of Public Books. I talked with Jonny and Cate at the beginning of the year. Each of them co-founded publications that exist somewhere between the academy and the world of cultural criticism. Both of their publications are young: Jo...

This week we hear Ian Millhiser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, debate "Citizens United" with Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Hauenstein Center hosted the debate in 2015; the issues the debate addresses are still relevant today. Here’s a quick brush up: In "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission," the Supreme Court decided tha...

This week we hear from Jo Livingstone, the culture staff writer at The New Republic and a recent PhD in English at New York University. I mention Jo Livingstone’s PhD because that’s a major topic of our conversation. Livingstone’s writing at The New Republic has the kind of agile, supple thinking and prose you’d want from a critic who has her thumb on the pulse of culture, but she blends that styl...

This week, we hear Dan Varner, President and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit, deliver a Wheelhouse Talk. Varner leads efforts to support 900+ local businesses in Detroit with a reliable workforce, and helps empower trainees with skills for workplace success. Before joining Goodwill, Dan served as the CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, a partnership of city organizations working to imp...

In this episode, the historian Hank Meijer talks about the work and influence of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican from Michigan who, at the dawn of the Cold War, worked with Democratic administrations to build congressional support for huge foreign policy endeavors, including the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the United Nations.

This week we hear from Andrew Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University. Andrew is currently hard at work on a book about Karl Marx. I asked him to come on the podcast because the name Marx seems to be in the air right now. It’s not just that we’ve come up the centenary of the Russian Revolution. People seem to want to talk about, or at least debate once again, the merit of Marx...

In this episode, we hear from Juliet Fleming, Professor of English at New York University and author, most recently, of "Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida," out from the University of Chicago Press. I ask Juliet to defend Derrida against skeptics both inside and outside the academy. She talks about what she says when she is called upon, at cocktail parties and in academe, to "explain" Der...

In this episode, we hear from Erik S McDuffie, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois. Just the other day, the Hauenstein Center posted a call for papers for the fourth "Finding the Lost Region" conference to be held on June 6th, 2018. The problem the conference seeks to address is the lack of institutional support for the study of Midwestern history. Why don't more hi...

Today, we hear, to begin with, a portion of a recently released documentary about President Gerald R. Ford. The documentary premiered on National Geographic. The portion we are about to hear was presented to a packed audience at the Hauenstein Center on October 3, 2017, as part of the Center’s Character and the Presidency Series. A sponsor of that series is also a producer of the Ford documentary:...

Today we hear from Rebekah Warren, a Michigan state senator from the 18th district. Considered by some to be the most liberal member of the Michigan State Senate—after all, Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, is in her district—Senator Warren is in fact known for her ability and her willingness to reach across the aisle. By working effectively with Republicans on the senate, Warren...

Today, we hear from Andrew Spear, a professor of philosophy at Grand Valley State University. More specifically, Andrew is an epistemologist. His primary interest is in knowledge—he asks how we come to our beliefs about the world; how we come to know things, or believe that we know things; how we justify our beliefs. I wanted to talk with Andrew because I wanted to know how his work as an epistemo...

In today’s episode, we offer a conversation between Janet Napolitano—21st Governor of Arizona, former secretary of homeland security, and current president of the University of California system—and Christine Todd Whitman, 50th governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the EPA. The pair talk about how they each got involved in politics at the local and state level, and what it ultimately...

Today, we hear from Martha Jones, the Society of Black Almuni Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and formerly a professor at the University of Michigan. Jones brings some of her experience especially at that latter institution to bear on our topic today: politics on college campuses. We’re lucky she does. There’s been a lot of talk about campus politics, on both the left and right....