Being Human

An interview with Rudolph Ware, professor of history at the University of Michigan. The interview focuses on Professor Ware's life and career, particularly his recent book The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. The novel we discuss during the conversation is Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane.

An interview with Mabel Wilson, architect, designer, and professor of architecture at Columbia University. The interview focuses on Professor Wilson's life and career, including her 2012 book "Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums." The website for Who Builds Your Architecture?, which we discuss in the interview, can be found here: whobuilds.org/.

An interview with Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. The interview focuses on Dr. Shelby's life and career, particularly his work on race and justice.

An interview with Fred Moten, professor in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. The interview focuses on Professor Moten's life and career, particularly his recent volume of criticism called "consent not to be a single being." The Nathaniel Mackey poem "Destination Out," which Moten references at the end of the conversation, is available here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi…tination-out.

An interview with Allen MacDuffie, professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. The interview focuses on Professor MacDuffie's work as a scholar of Victorian literature and the environment. The essay we discuss, "Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial," is currently available on Jstor, here: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/vic…_info_tab_contents. Professor MacDuffie also mentions Rob Nixon's work during the conversation. A Being Human interview with Professor Nixon is available here: Humanities-pitt – Slow-violence-and-a-repertoire-of-selves-an-interview-with-rob-nixon.

An interview with Merry Wiesner-Hanks, distinguished professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The interview focuses on Professor Wiesner-Hanks' career as a world historian and a historian of women and gender. The Masha Gessen essay that she references can be found here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-queer-opposition-to-pete-buttigieg-explained. For even more insight into the experiences of the earliest wave of feminist scholars in the American academy, listen to the Being Human interview with Margaret Homans: https://soundcloud.com/humanities-pitt/margaret-homans-interview.

An interview with Clay Risen, deputy op-ed editor at the New York Times and author of The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century. The interview focuses on Risen's book on Roosevelt, as well as his general approach to writing popular American history.

An interview with Rebecca Jordan-Young, professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. The interview focuses on Professor Jordan-Young's research into the science of gender and sexuality, particularly her most recent book Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, which she co-authored with Katrina Karkazis.

An interview with Simon Gikandi, professor of English at Princeton University and President of the Modern Language Association (MLA). The interview focuses on Professor Gikandi's life and career, and the role that literature and art played for him growing up in a postcolonial setting. We also discuss the upcoming MLA conference, the theme of which is...Being Human!

An interview with Angie Cruz, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the novel Dominicana (2019). The interview focuses on Professor Cruz's recent novel and her work editing the literary journal Aster(ix). Link to Aster(ix) here: asterixjournal.com/. The interview "Editing with Love and Openness is Activism" is available here: www.thereviewreview.net/interviews/ed…hat-angie-cru. The essay "What We Deserve" from the Paris Review is available here: www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/…t-we-deserve/.

An interview with David Crandall and Elizabeth Dowd of Theatre Nohgaku, an international performance ensemble whose members share a passion for noh theater and a conviction that it has profound power for audiences today. The interview took place on September 11, 2019, ahead of their upcoming performance of Gettysburg: An American Noh in Pittsburgh. For more information on the company, the performance, or noh theater in general, visit their website here: www.theatrenohgaku.org/.        

An interview with Caspar Pearson, Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. The interview focuses on Professor Pearson's life and career, particularly his work on Alberti and contemporary European architecture.

An interview with Maria Loh, Professor of Art History at CUNY Hunter College. The interview focuses on Professor Loh's life and career, particularly her work on Titian and early modern painting. Her newest book is titled Titian's Touch: Art, Magic, and Philosophy.

A reading and interview with Andrea Brady, professor of poetry at Queen Mary University of London and fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. The interview was taped live at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh on February 27, 2019. It focuses on Professor Brady's recently completed poem The Blue Split Compartments as well as her writing on Drone Poetics. A sample of the poem she reads can be found here: www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue20/An…yBM20.html. The essay "Drone Poetics" was published in volume 89-90 (2017) of the journal "new formations."    

An interview with Ed Ayers, Tucker-Boatright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. The interview focuses on Professor Ayers' life and career, particularly his work with digital humanities and southern history. The "Everyone Their Own Historian" address that Professor Ayers references can be viewed here: www.edwardayers.com/presidential-address. Many of the other digital projects discussed in the interview can be found through Professor Ayers' website, here: www.edwardayers.com/.

An interview with Steve Lyons, director of research for the Natural History Museum. The interview focuses on NHM's work within the museum sector, particularly their attempts to change the politics of museum practice. More information on all of the exhibits and projects we discuss can be found on NHM's website, here: thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/. More information on the artist collective Not an Alternative is available here: notanalternative.org/.

An interview with Nuruddin Farah, novelist and winner of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Farah was in Pittsburgh for an editorial meeting of the journal boundary 2. Special thanks for Professor Paul Bové for helping arrange the interview.

An interview with Kazuo Hara, Japanese documentary filmmaker and winner of the first biennial University of Pittsburgh Japan Documentary Film Award. The interview focuses on Hara's nearly 50 years of documentary filmmaking and the social impact his films have had in Japan and worldwide. Special thanks to Charles Exley, professor of modern Japanese literature and film at Pitt, for translating and recording Hara's responses. And thanks as usual to Noah Livingston, humanities media fellow at Pitt, for his production work.

An interview with Noël Carroll, distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The interview focuses mostly on Professor Carroll's work on horror, particularly his 1990 book The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. It was part of the 50th anniversary celebration of George Romero's film Night of the Living Dead, which was filmed in Pittsburgh in 1968.

Highlights from a panel conversation on September 26, 2018 titled "Environmental Institutions: Representing Nature in the Anthropocene." The panel featured Reid Frazier (Energy Reporter, The Allegheny Front and StateImpact Pennsylvania), Nicole Heller (Curator of the Anthropocene, Carnegie Museum of Natural History), and Heather Houser (Associate Professor of English, University ofTexas-Austin). It was hosted by Dan Kubis (Associate Director, University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center). Reid, Heather, and Nicole were representing three different kinds of institutions: universities, museums, and the media. These institutions help us understand our relationship with the environment and define possibilities moving forward. But do they see these realities and possibilities in the same way? How might they work together to better formulate our current environmental realities or motivate future action? What can other institutions or perspectives add to the conversation? Our guests worked towards answering these ques