In this episode, we interview Anthony Bogues is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana Studies, and Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Professor Bogues began his academic career at the University of the West Indies in his native Jamaica and moved to Brown in the year 2000. In this interview, we focus on the broad range of topics that he has written on throughout his career, including intellectual and political history, literature and literary criticism, and most recently the visual arts.

This episode features an interview with Margaret Homans, professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale. In the early 70’s, Professor Homans was an undergraduate at Yale in the earliest years of co-education at that university. Since then, she has established herself as an important feminist critic as well as a mentor to young women looking to follow in her footsteps. Our interview focuses on her career as a literary scholar and the impact her work has had on her profession and the world more broadly.

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker based in Paris. In 2006, the French magazine TelQuel published an interview with Taïa in which he openly discussed his homosexuality for the first time. At this point, he says, he went from being “the new hip Moroccan writer” to “the new hip gay Moroccan writer.” In this interview, we focus on Taïa’s life, writing, and directorial debut in the film Salvation Army (2013).

This inaugural episode of The University of Pittsburgh Year of the Humanities podcast features an interview with Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University. As a scholar, Dr. Cassuto has written several books on American literature and culture; as a columnist, Cassuto writes a regular column for the Chronicle called “the graduate advisor,” in which he focuses on the current state of graduate education in American colleges and universities. The interview focuses on Professor Cassuto’s work within and beyond the University, and his thoughts on how to bridge the two.