Unscripted with Alan Flurry

As disruptive and divisive as artificial intelligence can seem, is AI also a force that can push people closer together in status and value? An Unscripted interview with AI influencer and transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Dinkins holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art at Stony Brook University...

The author of twenty-one volumes, including the bestselling “Essential Rumi” (1995) and “Rumi: The Big Red Book” (2010), which collects 34 years of his work on Rumi’s ghazals and rubai, Coleman Barks has spent the past sixty years exploring the possibilities of American ecstatic poetry through his translations of the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. University of Georgia professor...

Unscripted interview with Yale University professor of art history Tim Barringer on the subject of Victorian-era art critic John Ruskin and his writing, including on the Political Economy of Art. "He saw the connection between the way we organize our society and the inherent unfairness of it, and the kind of art that gets produced." Instrumental in providing the liberating spark to re-evaluate the...

Interview with  Billy R. Hammond , a professor in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of psychology behavioral and brains sciences program and co-author of a fascinating new research study that describes how lifestyle choices can help protect us from degenerative diseases later in life, as we age. The study detailed several degenerative conditions, from autoimmune di...

Interview with UGA marine sciences professor Patricia Yager, who served as co-chief scientist and lead P.I. on the project Artemis on the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. The research team's 65-day expedition to the Amundsen Sea Polynya in western Antarctica was designed to better understand the impact of melting glaciers and ice shelves on the coastal ocean's biological productivity.

Unscripted interview with  Thomas Wartenberg,  Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, author of “Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children's Literature” and “A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children's Literature.” Along with maintaining a  popular website  for teaching children philosophy, W...

On a weekend voyage 80 miles off the Georgia coast, oceanography professor Patricia Yager and UGA undergraduate and graduate students collected phytoplankton, water and CO2 samples along a vertical route in the ocean and shared details about the effects of climate change and ocean acidification on marine life in ocean and estuarine habitats.

Interview with UGA professor of statistics and Fellow of the American Statistical Association  Nicole Lazar.  One of three co-authors of an editorial published in a special issue of The American Statistician in March 2019 that addressed a compelling issue effecting research and clinical trial results across the sciences, Lazar speaks with Alan Flurry about the use of stati...

The very idea there is such a thing as the internet is an invention of science fiction. When William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1984 in the book Neuromancer, he described it as “a consensual hallucination." In this Unscripted interview, Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland...

Interview with three-term former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chad Smith on the rise of hard-edged populism going back to Andrew Jackson, leading to Cherokee Removal from their homeland in Georgia and elsewhere in the Southeast. Smith  relates that example to what it tells us about the current political situation in the United States. A major figure in Indian affairs, Smit...

Is the system of higher education still capable providing real opportunity for young Americans, as well as reinforcing the societal stability on which American democracy depends? In this interview, New York Times bestselling author Paul Tough talks about his new book, THE YEARS THAT MATTER MOST, which delivers fresh insight on how the American system of colleges and universities helps an...

On August 6, 2019, the great American writer Toni Morrison passed away at the age of 88. Her extraordinary achievements in fiction – a Nobel Prize in Literature and multiple best-selling novels exploring black identity in America – established a new benchmark not only in American arts and letters, but in literature worldwide. Alan Flurry spoke with UGA professor of English Barbara McCaskill b...

A.G. Steer Professor of German and associate dean in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences,  Martin Kagel is co-director of the Berlin Seminar in Transnational European Studies. A joint initiative of the University of Georgia Franklin College and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the week-long r...

Professor Nik Heynen is the co-director of the UGA Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land and Agriculture on Sapelo Island. Georgia. One of the natural treasures among the barrier islands along the Georgia coast, Sapelo is the home of the only remaining Gullah-Geechee community in America. The island and its people face threats from rising seas as well as exurbanization. Heynen explains...