I have been a reference librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice since 2007. I enjoy consuming and writing about pop culture, old and new. Especially television. And podcasts.
Dr. Jean Mills, Associate Professor and chairperson in the English Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Dr. Ria Banerjee, Professor of English and Honors Program Coordinator at Guttman Community College and the Graduate Center, are both literary modernists. In this episode they discuss feminist modernist studies, antiwar and pacifist literature, as well as ideas about teaching, learning, and scholarship in general. But the content is even more far reaching than that. There is talk of the value of physical bookstores, concepts of inheritance and relevance, archival research, anti-intellectualism, live reading marathons, and Star Trek slash fan fiction. They begin by discussing Ria’s book, Drafty Houses in Forster, Eliot, and Woolf: Spatiality and Cultural Politics.
This episode continues a collaboration with CUNY Academy, for which Dr. Banerjee is deputy director and awards director. She will be presenting at CUNY Academy Book Talks on Friday, April 4 at 3pm at the Graduate Center.
Dr. Dijana Jelača, lecturer in cinema studies at Brooklyn College, and Dr. Olivera Jokić, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies and Director of the Gender Studies Program at John Jay College, discuss Past: An Introduction to the Problem: Želimir Žilnik on Film, Communism, and Former Yugoslavia. The book, originally published in 2013, is considered to be one with either no author or with many, and so Dr. Jokic is among them, having recently re-edited and translated it from Serbo-Croatian to English. Among the numerous issues raised by the book that Dijana and Olivera discuss is the political and philosophical context of making art, historiography and inclusion and exclusion, and the role of feminism in state socialism.
The popularity of the true crime genre, including books, podcasts, TV shows, and documentaries, has seen a resurgence over the past decade. It’s certainly had an effect on our media consumption, but it has other consequences, too. In The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU Press*, 2023) , Dr. Diana Rickard, Professor of Criminal Justice and Social Science at Borough of Manhattan Community College, argues that it’s done much more, such as expose the inequalities inherent in the American criminal justice system. In this episode Diana talks with her BMCC colleague, Associate Professor of English Dr. Tracy Bealer, who is well-versed in the world of true crime fiction. You can check out her Substack newsletter, True Crime Fiction, and look out for a forthcoming collection from McFarland that looks at true crime through the lenses of history, ethics, gender, and genre to which she contributed a chapter entitled “A Counterhistory of American True Crime.”
Dr. Rickard mentions a couple of things in the episode that she recalled by name after the fact: an HBO MAX series Mind Over Murder, about the aftermath of an exoneration of several wrongfully convicted people in a small Nebraska town, and the book Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin.
This episode continues a collaboration with CUNY Academy. Diana Rickard is a past participant in their book talk series.
*Diana did an interview with NYU Press about The New True Crime.
Laura Katz Olson is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. She is also an alumna of City College and was a student during the iconic 1960s’ period of the civil rights and antiwar movements. Her novel, Wrinkled Rebels (Vine Leaves Press, 2024) is a vivid representation of the lives of six City College student activists during that time and reunites with them decades later. Olivia Wood, Lecturer in the English Department at City College, talks with Professor Olson about the novel, and together they place the characters and events of the story into the present-day resurgence of campus protests and the current election season. They talk about activism past and present, the meaning and evolution of campus spaces, the “ivory tower” and the purpose of academic writing.
In acknowledgement and celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, Indoor Voices presents its first Spanish language episode. It’s a conversation between Mercedes Diez, Director of Communications and College Relations at Lehman College, and professor Ulises Gonzales of the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Lehman. They discuss Professor Gonzales’s new book, La Vida Papaya en Nueva York, a collection of personal essays about his journey navigating life in New York. (Follow Prof. Gonzales on Instagram.)
Sixteen of the CUNY colleges are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and the university can proudly boast that CUNY comprises nearly half of the HSIs in New York State.
Thanks to Friend of the Podcast, Richard Relkin, Assistant Vice President for Communications & Marketing at Lehman, for bringing this conversation to fruition!
Professor Bratspies was motivated to embark on this project while stuck in a traffic jam in the Bronx. Her frustration at the famously busy Major Deegan Expressway led to the question, “Who were these people and why do they name things after them?” For many years her work has been in the area of environmental justice and human rights. While Naming Gotham may look at first glance like a departure, it’s not. It, too, addresses issues of power and social inequality and incorporates legal history such as the origins of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Listeners will get a preview of some of the so-called villains – Richard Riker, Peter Stuyvesant – and heroes – Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King, Herbert Lehman* – whose sometimes surprising stories are told in Naming Gotham. Profs. Bratspies and Gomez-Velez also talk about connections between teaching and some of the named parties as well as the uses of history and the way it repeats itself. And as they agree, there is always something more to learn about New York City.
This episode features two pioneers in the field of Black Studies, both Lehman College faculty. Dr. Mark Christian, Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Lehman College, is the author, most recently of two books, Booker T. Washington: A Life in American History * and Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic, that are the basis of his conversation with one of his mentors, Dr. William Seraile, professor emeritus of African American history at Lehman. (See bios below.) Dr. Seraile asks his colleague Dr. Christian, how, as a kid who grew up in 1970s Liverpool, England, he got interested in African American Studies. They discuss a range of influential figures in Black history from Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Muhammed Ali all the way to Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Dr. Christian talks about the surprisingly critical role played by Thomas Dixon who was wary of Booker T. Washington’s self determination program and whose 1905 novel The Clansman was the basis for the highly controversial and legendarily racist film The Birth of a Nation produced in 1915. As Dr. Christian puts it, “If you want to understand what Booker T. Washington was up to, read Thomas Dixon.” Their conversation is both deep and wide. They raise questions about economic strength in Black communities, what has come from the lessons of Black leaders in U.S. history, and the origins and future of Black Studies.
As Dr. Seraile habitually tells his students: “Go to the library. Do the research.” The two commiserate about how difficult it once was to find information for research in Black Studies. Students and scholars don’t face the same obstacles these days. Case in point, the multi-volume Booker T. Washington Papers, mentioned in this episode, is widely available in public libraries (see call number E185.97 .W274 at your CUNY library).
Dr. Mark Christian has been at Lehman College since August 2011. He arrived as a full and tenured professor and was the chairperson of the Department of Africana Studies from 2011 to 2019. Since his tenure as chairperson ended, he has published three books in his areas of scholarly interest: The 20th Century Civil Rights Movement: An Africana Studies Perspective (2021); an award-winning biography, Booker T. Washington: A Life in American History (2021) and Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic (2022). Dr. Christian is a native of Liverpool, England; he completed his BA (Hons.) and PhD degrees in the UK, and his MA in Black Studies from The Ohio State University. He has lived and worked in the US full-time since 2000. A former senior Fulbright Scholar at Kent State University, Department of Pan African Studies (1997-8) and researcher with the Commonwealth Institute, University of London, Dr. Christian is currently completing a biography on Frederick Douglass for Bloomsbury Press that is slated to be published within the next year.
Dr. William Seraile is a professor emeritus of African American history from Lehman College where he was, in 1971, one of the pioneer scholars in the field of Africana Studies. His Peace Corps tour in Ethiopia (1963-1965) exposed him to the ancient kingdoms of Axum and Lalibela which inspired him to embark on a self- study of African American history. He earned a doctorate in American history from the CUNY in 1977. He is the author of five books and has been a frequent guest on radio and cable television shows. His scholarship and activism resulted in numerous awards including the prestigious Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (2017).
*Named a 2022 Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association, a division of the American Library Association.
George Guida teaches writing and literature at New York City College of Technology. He is the author of ten books, including the novel Posts from Suburbia (Encircle Publications, 2022), and several poetry and essay collections. He also curates the Finger Lakes Arts Series in Dansville, New York. His new novel, The Uniform, was published by Guernica Editions in Spring 2024. It’s the mid-20th century story of Alfie Baliato, an aspiring musician whose family moves from a small town to New York City, following a fateful incident of racially motivated violence. Alfie’s romantic love for a cousin he meets in New York sends him on a decades-long odyssey across American and through struggles as a salesman, cop, family man, and artist in search of redemption.
In this episode, George talks with Jeffrey Heiman and Adam Berlin, editors of the nationally recognized, Pushcart Prize ranked J Journal: New Writing on Justice, a literary journal housed at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. George has been published three times in that publication, the first piece, “Rome,” (Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2008) which previewed The Uniform, specifically Alfie’s experience as a cop at the 1968 Columbia University protests. They talk about Alfie, The Uniform and more, including some great craft questions. Jeffrey and Adam, English professors at John Jay and authors themselves, have visited Indoor Voices twice before (see episodes 38 and 50), and I look forward to more visits from them and more J Journal contributors in the future..
Indoor Voices Podcast 
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