Dr. Caroline Reitz is an associate professor of English at John Jay and the Graduate Center and the author of Female Anger in Crime Fiction published by Cambridge University Press in the Elements in Crime Narratives series. She is in conversation in this episode with Dr. Olivia Rutigliano, a writer, film critic, and editor at Literary Hub and Crime Reads. Together they take on the female anger ecocsystem, particularly the way anger is portrayed in popular culture, the role that anger plays, and its potential and its limits. They ask where justice fits into the narratives of, for example, the streaming series Killing Eve, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Bad Sisters and in the novel My Sister, the Serial Killer. They ask what pop culture’s role is in bringing the causes and outcomes of anger to the fore and if these representations can be educational and empowering. They address trad wives, female assassins and the chicken and egg conundrum of madness and anger. They reference bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Sara Paretsky, Patricia Melo, George Orwell, Victorian studies, and all the waves of feminism. They reminisce about the olden times when ultra rich megalomaniacs used to be philanthropic and at least ostensibly concerned about humanity. They weave in the importance of baby goats and recycling your tuna cans, and Caroline comes up with a crime plot on the spot. This conversation will fire you up in good ways and, well, that’s one of the questions asked here, and not rhetorically – what use is getting fired up?

Caroline Reitz is Associate Professor at John Jay and the Graduate Center and directs the Vera Fellows Program at John Jay. She is currently teaching two literature classes: Text and Context (with a focus on crime fiction and activism) and Special Topics in the 19th Century. In Spring 2026 she will teach a class at the Grad Center called “Bad Sisters.” 

Olivia Rutigliano is a film critic, editor at Literary Hub and Crime Reads and an instructor at John Jay College, currently teaching a course on justice and literature in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Contemporary Drift by Theodore Martin
• Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers by Arundhati Roy
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm
• “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell

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