Time to Eat the Dogs

Sean Cocco talks about the 1631 eruption of Vesuvius and its impact on Renaissance science and culture. Cocco is an associate professor of history at Trinity College. He is the author of  Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy .

Shayne Legassie talks about Medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the au...

Cole Kelleher talks about his work for the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, an agency that uses satellite data to make cutting-edge maps for the support of polar scientists in the field. 

Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 1970s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture. Maher is a professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He is the author of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius .

Scott Wallace talks about his 2002 expedition into Amazon to find the Arrow People, one of the world's last uncontacted tribes. Wallace is a  professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut, a contributor to National Geographic, and a former reporter for CBS and CNN. He's the author of  The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes .

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose posthumous reputation has changed many times since his disappearance 170 years ago. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He's the author of Ludwig Leichhardt's Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth .

Hal Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young René Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as studying philosophy. Cook is the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Annette Joseph Gabrielle talks with Bianca Williams about African American women who travel to Jamaica as tourists looking for happiness, intimacy, and new identities free from the limits of American racism. Joseph-Gabrielle is an assistant professor of French at the University of Minnesota. Williams is an associate professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She...

Anthropologist John Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology: the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science's relationship with indigenous peoples. Hawks is the co-author of  Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed...

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut Avery Point. She is the author of  Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans  (Reaktion, 2018). 

Sarah Pickman talks about the literature of exploration. She offers some picks for categories of exploration books not commonly seen in indexes and bibliographies.

Doctoral candidate Sarah Pickman talks about studying exploration for her Ph. D exams: specifically what it's like to read three hundred books and articles and then discuss them in front of a committee of professors.

Artist Chiadikobi Nwaubani talks about his efforts to find, restore, and publish photographs from the colonial archives of West Africa. He also talks about his work re-interpreting these photographs using art and photo-manipulation.

Dr. Angelina Callahan talks about the Naval Research Laboratory's Project Vanguard. While this satellite mission was part of the Cold War "Space Race," it also represented something more: a scientific platform for understanding the space environment as well as a test vehicle that would provide data for satellites of the future.

Andrea Wulf's book the The Invention of Nature tells the story of Alexander von Humboldt, one of the world's most important nineteenth-century explorers. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra talks about some of the problems of the book, specifically how Wulf's view of Humboldt divorces him from the intellectual traditions of Central and South American scholars who helped Humboldt imagine the Americas for Euro...

Dr. Karen Routledge talks about Baffin Island's Inuit community as it comes into contact with western whalers and explorers in the nineteenth century. Even though the Inuit worked closely with outsiders, their views of the Arctic world, their ideas about the meaning of home, even their views of time itself remained different. Routledge is a historian with Parks Canada. Her new book, Do You See Ice...

Matthew James talks about the 1905 Galapagos Expedition organized by the California Academy of Sciences. James is a professor of geology at Sonoma State University. He is the author of Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin .

Professor Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks about Eslanda Robeson who, in addition to being a political activist with her husband Paul Robeson, was a chemist, anthropologist, and epic traveler.

Andrew Denning talks about the Nazi cult of mobility, a set of ideas and practices that were crucial to its racist ideology. Denning is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is the author the essay "'Life is Movement, Movement is life!' Mobility Politics and the Circulatory State in Nazi Germany," published in the American Historical Review .

Noel Phillips discusses the growing popularity of climbing among women. Her article, "No Man's Land: The Rise of Women in Climbing" was recently published in Climbing Magazine.

Journalist Carl Hoffman talks about Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri, two men who arrived in Borneo with very different dreams and aspirations. Hoffman served as a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired Magazine. He is the author of  The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure .

David Munns, professor of history at John Jay College, talks about his new book, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War .

Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz talks about the ethics of colonizing Mars and new developments in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Scientists have now identified almost 4000 exoplanets --planets that orbit stars outside our own solar system-- and with powerful new telescopes about to come on line, that number is about to skyrocket. Exoplanet scientist Hannah Wakeford, Giaconni Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute, discusses this revolutionary new field and its impact on Earth and planetary sciences. 

Historian Emily Kern talks about the search for human origins in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically why anthropologists came to see Africa – rather than Asia – as the cradle of the human species.