Episode 128: Sara McDougall on reassessing medieval norms

~ Kathleen Collins

Sara McDougall is professor of history at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center where she is also is appointed in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies. She specializes in gender and justice in the Middle Ages, with a focus on women’s encounters with legal and religious ideas in the society and culture of Medieval France. In this episode, she talks with me about her latest book, Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor, published by Princeton University Press. It’s the story of a woman in 15th century Dijon, who courageously pursued a criminal complaint for sexual assault, prompting an investigation that exposed the challenges of seeking justice in medieval society and to readers, perhaps some surprises. Rigorously researched through forensic analysis of witness testimony and court records, Dr. McDougall engagingly reconstructs Jehanne’s story of resilience, revealing the essential role of the community, while challenging long held assumptions about familiar narratives of medieval women as entirely powerless. It’s an engaging and suspenseful read, and offers a lot to unpack. We talk about Sara’s discovery of Jehanne’s story, how she hopes to have readers join her on the quest for information, and ultimately, what lessons Jehanne’s story offers readers, historians, and survivors in navigating today’s justice system.

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Episode 127: Curating and disrupting geography

~ Kathleen Collins
Text graphic for an event titled 'Uneven Geographies' with dates from September 3 to October 30, 2026. The background features a dark and abstract geographical representation.

The current exhibition at John Jay College’s Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, Uneven Geographies, features the work of six artists, working in diverse media, whose projects illustrate how official policies and conventions can lead to political, economic, ecological, and cultural dispossession. The show ends on October 30 so, try to get there to see it if you can. If you live elsewhere or miss the show, this episode is still well worth listening to. In it, gallery director Macushla Robinson talks with Uneven Geographies curators, Candice Strongwater and Gauri Bahuguna, about the curatorial process, art as an alternative form of justice, what constitutes evidence, the relationship between art and activism and subverting fixed ideas of what is meant by geography. Candice is an independent curator and Senior Manager of Research and Curatorial Initiatives at SITU Research. Gauri is a computational designer and Deputy Director of Research at SITU.

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Episode 126: Talia Argondezzi on satirizing academia

~ Kathleen Collins

I had the pleasure of talking with the author of Bedtime Stories for Academics: Quibbles and Squabbles at Typical University, published by University of Toronto Press. The author, Talia Argondezzi, is an alumna of the CUNY Graduate Center doctoral program in English, and for the last 13 years has been at Ursinius College in Collegeville PA where she teaches and is the director of the writing and speaking program. Bedtime Stories is a collection of well-known myths and fairy tales set in the world of higher education with recontextualized characters. Characters include Cinderadjunct and Professor Sisyphus, and just a few of the stories are “A Finals Week Christmas Carol,” “The Tortoise and the Hare Execute Their Research Agendas,” and “Goldilocks and the Three Reviewers.” It is a hilarious and spot on read, and I urge you to get a copy and read it immediately. While there is admittedly much to critique in this sector where many of us spend our days and decades, Talia’s stories, above all are funny and affectionately critical.

She talks with me in this episode about finding a new side to her writing self while working in academia and living in a pandemic lockdown, and how comedy and satire have now become her dominant mode. She enjoys the much less fraught publishing process writing for outlets like The New Yorker and McSweeney’s as compared to scholarly publishing and the fact that her friends and colleagues read her output with absolutely no cajoling. She talks about the social and emotional benefit of satire, especially how comedy helps us through hard times.

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Episode 125: Brian Jones on the power of Black history

~ Kathleen Collins

Dr. Brian Jones has held several positions at the New York Public Library, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Center for Educators and Schools, and now as the Senior Director of Reading and Engagement. He is an alumnus of the doctoral program in Urban Education at the Graduate Center as is his conversation partner and fellow scholar, Dr. Robert Robinson. When Robert challenges Brian to an abbreviated biography, Brian refers to himself as a reader, writer, teacher, and learner of Black history. In this episode, they discuss Brian’s latest book, Black History is for Everyone, published by Haymarket Books in 2025. Their deep and thought-provoking conversation is framed around the four themes from Brian’s book: race, nation, revolution, and education.

Dr. Robert Robinson is assistant professor in Africana Studies and Gender Studies at John Jay and doctoral faculty in Urban Studies, Africana Studies and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy at the Graduate Center. His forthcoming book, Education for the Revolution: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, will be published by NYU Press in January.

Some of the scholars and books mentioned:

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Episode 124: Mark McBeth on objects and queer literacy

~ Kathleen Collins

Mark McBeth, Professor of English at John Jay and the Graduate Center, has had a keen interest in objects for a long time. That interest has manifested in his creative and scholarly life and has evolved into a deep respect for finding, preserving and interpreting them. In his latest book, Objectionable: The Quasi-objects of Queer Literacy (Peter Lang, 2026), he uncovers how physical everyday items (specifically here: police cadet textbooks, young adult sex education manuals, and syndicated advice columns) have actively enforced homophobia or enabled queer survival. Objectionable follows the narrative thread in his previous book, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents (Lexington Books, 2019), but it shifts the analysis from the systemic institutional sponsors of homophobic rhetoric to the tangible, everyday textual objects that have a profound impact on queer survival, identity, and resistance. In other words, a focus from the powerful agency of people to that of things.

In this episode, Prof. McBeth talks about Bruno Latour and the sociological lens of quasi-objects (things that are neither purely social constructs nor inert physical matter), the interdependence of literary sponsors, his elementary school teacher Mrs. Spencer, a certain medical dictionary (see photo below), significant figures in the world of queer archives such as Barbara Gittings, and some of his own archival quests.

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Episode 123: Martin Cloutier on humor & sex in literary fiction

~ Kathleen Collins

Martin Cloutier is an adjunct assistant professor at the College of Staten Island where he teaches writing to undergraduates. So, needless to say, we spend some unavoidable time in this episode talking about AI. But first we talk about Martin’s Lambda Literary Award-nominated novel, Waiting for Something Else, which was published by Heliotrope Books in 2025. Taking the description from one reviewer because it’s so pithy and perfect, it’s an “irreverent, unrequited sex comedy.” Martin talks about his bewilderment at the lack of funny literary novels as well as the lack of sex. So those two elements are deliberately at the forefront in this book. We had fun kvetching about the tyranny of likable characters and a general blandness and purity in contemporary fiction. Get ready for some strong opinions, or as we would describe it – hard truths. Zoomers, academics and book publishing professionals, you’ve been warned!

Thank you, once again, to the generous Emily Sohmer Tai and the CUNY Academy for the Humanities & Sciences for this collaboration.

Here are some of the books we mentioned (because they are empirically good):

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Episode 122: Adam McKible on Jim Crow modernism

~ Kathleen Collins

Adam McKible is a Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His most recent book is Jim Crow Modernism, a volume co-edited with Keith Clark and Robert Jackson. In this volume and in his previous book, Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity, Adam explains how and why American literary modernism and Jim Crow modernism are deeply and fundamentally intertwined. In this new collection, he and the contributors expand on the definitions. One of those contributors, LaGuardia Community College Professor of English Jesse Schwartz  – who is also a faculty committee member at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center – joins Adam in discussing the new book, the riches of periodical studies, big and little magazines, the blessing and the curse of microfilm versus  digitization, “recovery work,” and what it means for a publication to “register and re-contain.”

Professors McKible and Schwartz have been colleagues for a long time! See below for evidence. Their rapport in this conversation is another delightful testament.

Save the date for the Jim Crow Modernism symposium, Sept. 25, 2026 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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Adam McKible
NEH City of Print Seminar, 2015
Jesse Schwartz

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Episode 121: C. Julian Jiménez on manifesting queer joy

~ Kathleen Collins

C. Julian Jiménez is an award-winning queer, Puerto Rican, and Dominican playwright and Chairperson of the Department of Communication, Theatre, and Media Production at Queensborough Community College. In this episode, he’s in conversation with a friend and former castmate from their Rider University days. Elaina Battista-Parsons is an editor, writer, and reader for Vine Leaves Press and micro fiction instructor for Yellow Arrow Publishing. She interviewed the New York Historical’s Valerie Paley last year. They reminisce a bit about their performing past, then launch into Julian’s creative work and his CUNY life – the two of which are inextricably intertwined.

Purchase Julian’s plays at Theatrical Rights Worldwide and The Outrage.

Julian & Elaina in costume for a production of Lend Me a Tenor

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Episode 120: Mila Burns on the South American Cold War

~ Kathleen Collins

Mila Burns is associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at Lehman College and of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also the associate director at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies. Dr. Burns’s most recent book is Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and the South American Cold War published by the University of North Carolina Press. The book reshapes conventional understandings of the South American Cold War by emphasizing Brazil’s proactive role in the Chilean coup. Drawing on testimonies of Brazilian political exiles and newly declassified sources, Dr. Burns demonstrates that the conflict was not solely U.S.-driven, but involved regional actors, and that both repression and resistance operated across national boundaries. She talks about the book in a lively conversation with Richard Relkin, good friend of the podcast and Assistant Vice President for Communications and Marketing at Lehman College.

For more about Próspera, the Honduran city referenced in the episode, see this New York Times article.

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Episode 119: Jennifer T. Roberts on the infinite variety of the ancient Greeks

~ Kathleen Collins
Book cover of 'Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture' by Jennifer T. Roberts, featuring various ancient Greek motifs and illustrations.

Jennifer T. Roberts, Professor of Classics and History, and Nickolas Pappas, Professor of Philosophy and Classics, have been City College colleagues for more than thirty years. Here they discuss Jen’s latest book, Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture. The word “many” in the book’s title describes the variation within and among the ancient Greeks, and the word “one” is a nod to the steadfast ego and drive of the individual, within which, too, there is vast diversity. They address opposing world views by various thinkers on the existence, the definition or surprising backstory and impact of concepts such as motion, courage, competitiveness, ostracism, and antagonism and Nick asks Jen what she thinks people imagine when they think of antiquity, and what students find most incomprehensible when it comes to learning about Ancient Greece.

In the event you might think this episode is not for the likes of you, I assure you that the conversation is lively, accessible and includes references to Seinfeld, the Muppets and Percy Jackson. Above all, their friendship and scholarly amity shines through, making this a conversation that will likely have you smiling as you listen.

Scroll down this page for a bit more about Jen who earned the Distinguished Professor title in 2025.

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