The Hayseed Scholar Podcast

Professor Timothy Longman of Boston University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Tim chats with Brent about growing up in Illinois and Kansas, with two politically active parents and a father who was a pastor. Professor Longman attended Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma, pursuing his interests of religion and politics. While there, he also became politically active, working on the Mondale cam...

Professor Anthony F. Lang, Jr. visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Tony grew up in Cleveland in a big Catholic family, and he went to Catholic schools all the way through college at Notre Dame, where he took a class with Alasdair MacIntyre. Tony shares how he became interested in philosophy, and then political science, pursuing his PhD at Johns Hopkins where he took classes from William Connolly,...

Professor Laura Shepherd from the University of Sydney joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Shepherd is an iconic and authoritative voice in International Relations, and especially with her multiple-award winning works on Gender, Peacebuilding, Methods, and and Feminism. And yet, she didn't start out planning for a career in academia. Growing up in London, then moving to just outside...

Professor Aida Hozic joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Aida chats with Brent about growing up in Sarajevo, the 1984 Olympics, pursuing theater and then having a change of career plans that led her to pursuing a Master's in Bologna, Italy, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and then a PhD at the University of Virginia. All of this as war and violence engulfed Saraj...

Professor Matt McDonald of the University of Queensland joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Brent has known of Matt's work for almost two decades, and known him directly for about half that time, emailing Matt about the latter's fantastic 2010 'Lest we Forget' IPS article and striking up a correspondence, then friendship, since that time. Matt talks about growing up in a small t...

Harry Gould of Florida International University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Brent and Harry have known one another since 2007, and have become best friends.  Harry talks about growing up in Florida, the formative experience of watching the Iranian Revolution unfold and becoming interesting in international politics, going to New College of Florida and deciding the foreign service wasn’t for...

Professor Lucian Ashworth of Memorial University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Luke talks about growing up in England and Wales, then moving to the Netherlands at the age of 15. He chats with Brent about his decision to go to Keele, some of the major figures in IR that shaped his interests very early on, and then going to Career Services at Keele to try and decide where to go for his PhD. Ult...

Professor Priya Dixit of Virginia Tech joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Priya talks about being born in Thailand, growing up in Nepal, college and her master's in Australia, working for the United Nations, and pursuing her graduate work at American University in DC and the transition to living in the United States.  She also discusses the challenges of the US Visa process, and how it has im...

Maria Mälksoo of the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent, joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Mälksoo chats about growing up in a small town in Estonia during and at the end of the Cold War, the decision to go to the University of Tartu and her exchange year in Montana, and taking the GRE in Helsinki and getting her picture taken following a rainstorm. She talks a...

Professor Juliet Kaarbo of the University of Edinburgh and Brent go way back to their days as colleagues at the University of Kansas in the mid-late 2000s. Julie shares with Brent her growing up in Kansas and Oklahoma, her graduate studies at the Ohio State University and developing her research program in Foreign Policy Analysis, getting the job at KU and the challenges of the tenure process espe...

Halvard Leira is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (aka 'NUPI') in Oslo. Professor Leira and Brent have been friends for some time. He chats with Brent about growing up in Norway in a family of academics, his 'devouring' of history, his graduate work at LSE and the University of Oslo, his joining NUPI and meeting the cohort of elite NUPI sch...

Dr Ayse Zarakol of the University of Cambridge joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr Zarakol chats with Brent about growing up in Turkey, her decisions to attend college in the US, become a political science and classics double-major, and pursue a Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin (and her dissatisfaction before it with work as a paralegal). She talks about graduate school, developing her diss...

Brent interviews Professor Cameron Thies of Arizona State University and the current President of the International Studies Association. Cameron talks about growing up in Nebraska, how the farm crisis along with world events got him interested in politics, almost taking a job globetrotting with Arthur Anderson, the helpful advice of his professors at the University of Nebraska during his Master’s,...

Brent chats with Jennifer Mitzen of Ohio State university. Jennifer talks about growing up in Evanston, Illinois, going to Wesleyan, living in New York after college and being an aerobics instructor, calling her mentor from a pay phone at 22 to ask for advice on grad school. Going to U of C for the PhD, her master’s thesis on Morgenthau/Waltz, her first dissertation topic on Arendt and how/why she...

Jelena Subotic of Georgia State University is an accomplished scholar of International Relations who focuses on the politics of memory and identity, transitional justice, international ethics, and ontological security studies. She spoke with Brent about a number of topics during their conversation. Jelena discusses growing up in Yugoslavia and how identity became an issue 'overnight' in...

Cian O'Driscoll is a Professor of International Relations, pursuing topics related to Just War, ethics, and international security. In this second part of Brent's interview with Cian, they discuss his early years as a junior scholar, including publishing, transitioning into his position at Glasgow, the infamous Elshtain book roundtable at the 2007 ISA, the International Ethics section of...

Cian O'Driscoll from the University of Glasgow does work on Just War theory, international security, and international political theory, and international ethics. He has been a friend of Brent's for well over a decade. They spoke in April 2019 following a workshop at the University of Warwick. Their conversation went a little long, so this is part 1 of 2 episodes with Cian. In this episo...

The first episode of the Hayseed Scholar podcast is an interview with Professor Peri Schwartz-Shea of the University of Utah. We discuss her evolution as a scholar and academic, the questions she's pursued in her research, and how she became so interested in interpretive methods.