Dr. April Burns, Associate Professor of Psychology at Guttman Community College, joined me for a CUNY Academy Book Talk where the subject was my own novel, Study in Hysteria (Vine Leaves Press, 2024). The best part of publishing this book is getting to hear different reactions to the story and the characters, and I’m always gratified when I feel like readers experienced some connection to it. April was an incredibly thoughtful reader and came up with even more new insights and observations. This conversation was recorded live and is a slightly edited version of the event. I’m grateful to the CUNY Academy team for providing this opportunity and to Dr. April Burns for her unique take on the book which was, to my delight, very character-centric, and which included the fantastic adjectives endometrial and autoethnographical.

Discussed/related/bonus:

• Excerpt from Study in Hysteria in Another Chicago Magazine
• Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
• Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

Listen to Episode 109 now! (Apple Podcasts)

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This episode takes us into the worlds of both academia and museums and reveals how the two come together in a unique program at CUNY. The conversation is between Valerie Paley, senior vice president and the Sue Ann Weinberg Director of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at The New York Historical, and Elaina Battista-Parsons, a current student in the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program. Valerie developed the program within the CUNY School of Professional Studies, and it launched in 2019. The two discuss the origins and mission of the program, the importance of cultural spaces, narratives, interpretation and education, innovative modalities, the “funding dance,” expanding and diversifying museum audiences, and breaking down barriers to make museum contents as accessible as possible. They also talk about showcasing women’s history, the HBO drama “The Gilded Age” and as, Elaina refers to what she is learning in the program, “secret museum truths.”

Valerie Paley is senior vice president and the Sue Ann Weinberg Director of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at The New York Historical. Formerly the chief historian at the institution, she is founding director of its Center for Women’s History, the first of its kind in the United States within the walls of a major museum. A graduate of Vassar College, Paley holds an MA in American Studies and a PhD in History from Columbia University, where she serves on the adjunct faculty at the Columbia Center for American Studies. Her work at New York Historical encompasses a critical range of curatorial, scholarly, and administrative responsibilities, including the development of a new joint MA Program in Museum Studies with the CUNY School of Professional Studies, which launched in Fall 2019. Paley is the 2020 recipient of the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award, recognizing distinguished contributions to the field of public history. 

Elaina Battista-Parsons wears many hats! You can learn more about her here and follow her on Instagram. Stay around for a mini-conversation between the two of us at the end to hear us enthuse about small presses and women and writers supporting one another.

Discussed/related/bonus:

• The American LGBTQ + Museum coming in 2026
• Women & the American Story (WAMS)
• NYHS Center for Women’s History blog
• Elaina’s new book, Chomp Press Pull, published by Vine Leaves Press
• Martha Engber’s YA book Winter Light published by Vine Leaves Press
• Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)
• “Ologies” podcast

Listen to Episode 108 now! (Apple Podcasts)

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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.

Discussed/related/bonus:

• Feminist Modernist Studies (journal)  
• Blue Heron Books – New*Used*Banned
• Ulster Literacy Association
• “A Dear Colleague Letter in Defense of DEI” by Shaun Harper (Inside Higher Ed)
• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
• The Anatomy of Facism by Robert O. Paxton
• Alice J. Mills Kirk/Spock (K/S) Fanzine Collection (Bowling Green State University Libraries finding aid)

Listen to Episode 107 now! (Apple Podcasts)

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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.

Discussed in this episode:

• Bini Adamczak’s Yesterday’s Tomorrow
• Adriana Zaharijević, “Serbia’s students are showing the world how to restore democratic hope” in The Guardian
• Kuda.org offers a free pdf of the book
• Iskra Books is the US publisher, also offers a free pdf of the book (US edition is slightly different)
• UNESCO: Memory of the World

Listen to Episode 106 now! (Apple Podcasts)

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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.

Listen to Episode 105 now! (Apple Podcasts)

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Mary Frances Phillips, a faculty member in the Department of Africana Studies at Lehman College from 2012-2024, has written the first biography of educator, poet, activist, former political prisoner and Black Panther Party veteran Ericka Huggins. The book, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins, is just out from NYU Press. In a moving and inspiring conversation, Dr. Phillips talks in this episode with her Lehman College colleague Olivia Moy. We wish Dr. Phillips well in her new position of Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Olivia Loksing Moy is an associate professor of English at Lehman College, where she teaches nineteenth-century British poetry, as well as literature courses for nursing, speech pathology, and social work students. She is the author of The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), co-editor of Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2023), and co-editor and translator of Julio y John: Selections from Imagen de John Keats (Lost and Found, 2019).She serves as Vice President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and co-organized The Audre Lorde Great Read in 2021. She had a conversation with Julia Miele Rodas in Episode 37.

Listen to Episode 104 now! (Apple Podcasts)

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Adam Berlin is a faculty member in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He also co-edits, with his colleague Jeffrey Heiman, J Journal: New Writing on Justice. They have visited the podcast before to talk about the journal and to have conversations with contributors Estha Weiner and George Guida. In this episode, I talked with Adam about his own writing and his recently published collection, All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights.

Listen to Episode 103 now! (Apple Podcasts)

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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!

Listen to Episode 101 now!
(Apple Podcasts)

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