Friends, historians, and colleagues, lend us your ears! This year, our annual meeting in New York City will feature our first-ever podcast stage. To get a sneak preview and to open up the conversation about how new media connects with intellectual history, I chatted with some of the featured podcasters: USIH2019 chair Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (Past Present), Andrew Hartman (Trotsky and the Wild Orchids), David Sehat (MindPop), and Gillian Frank (Sexing History). We look forward to seeing you at The New School’s podcast stage in November 2019!
Tell us about your podcast. Why did you start it, and what do you focus on?
Petrzela: Past Present’s tagline is “where hindsight becomes foresight” and that’s the basic premise: three historians using our understanding of the past and historical thinking in general to unpack current headlines in a way that we believe provides more insight than the usual cable-news hot takes or 280-character analyses that are all that many encounter in the mainstream media. If that sounds dry, I can tell you that we are three friends who laugh a lot and who take on not only serious topics like the Mueller Report or reparations for slavery, but also fidget spinners, SoulCycle, and other phenomena of modern life you might not have thought were historically important – many of those pop culture topics are actually our most popular episodes! We started PP because we realized that instead of screaming at the TV that the news needed more historians and deeper insights, we could use this then- new medium, the podcast, to cultivate the conversation we, and it turned out many others, craved. At USIH2019, we’ll be interviewing Emily Bazelon.
Hartman: Ray Haberski and I had been blogging at USIH for over ten years. I was one of the original founders of the blog in 2007, and Ray came aboard within the first year. I absolutely loved my time writing for the blog, and I think I’m safe in assuming the same for Ray. But I was burned out with blogging and so decided to retire and leave the USIH Blog in the capable hands of the few old timers hanging on and the many talented newcomers. But we both wanted to continue some public facing scholarship, and we had both gotten into listening to various podcasts. I personally had become addicted to the medium. We were curious about exploring what we could do with this medium for intellectual history. Mostly we just wanted to have fun, to continue the types of fun conversations we have with each other every year at the S-USIH conference and make these conversations available to anyone who might be interested in listening in.
Our biggest problem, our biggest barrier to entry, was technology. Neither of us had the slightest idea how to produce a podcast. This is where our producer Daniel Rinn comes in. I tweeted something about wanting to start a podcast, and Daniel responded about wanting to produce one. Or perhaps vice versa, I can’t remember exactly. And it’s been a great partnership. We focus on intellectual history, and we sometimes interview intellectual historians including Jefferson Cowie and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. We’re going to interview Kim Phillips-Fein for our live taping at the conference. We also talk about politics. We have some episodes about neoliberalism and taxation, for example. And we discuss pop culture, with episodes dedicated to Stranger Things and Game of Thrones. The conceit of the podcast is that it’s a conversation between a leftist (me) and a liberal (Ray), and as such we highlight areas of both agreement and disagreement.
Sehat: My podcast is an one-on-one interview podcast with other academics, journalists, or intellectuals. I started it about two and a half-years ago. I had gotten tenure, fell into a deep funk, and was looking for some way out. Eventually I realized that I had spent too much time sitting alone in a room, typing on a computer. I wanted an excuse to sit down with smart people, to have a good conversation, and to put out something creatively that was not text-based. I’ve now done 40 interviews. They all, in one way or another, have to do with ideas and politics in (mostly) American life.
Frank: Sexing History explores how the history of sexuality shapes our present. It is co-hosted by Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman and produced by a wonderful team of historians of sexuality. Our episodes have explored a range of historical topics including phone sex, marital advice, interfaith marriage, abortion provision, breast enhancement and sexual harassment. We launched Sexing History in 2017 in order to create a compelling resource for teachers, students and a wider public, which would help them interpret and historicize sexual politics. We recognized that most historians work in a textual, not an audio medium, when addressing audiences within and beyond the academy. As a result, the sounds that make up our sexual past are largely neglected. Further, we are deeply committed to oral history as a means of filling in archival gaps and presenting stories about the past. Podcasting became a perfect avenue to bring these interests together and speak to diverse audiences.
Prior to Sexing History, a few members of our team had been editing and writing pieces on the history of sexuality for popular audiences on blogs and for popular publications. We came to appreciate how public facing writing could make an impact and wanted to bring that commitment to the medium of podcasting. Specifically, we wanted to help our audience understand how present-day conflicts and norms have been shaped by historical forces. And we wanted to share our appreciation of the strangeness of the past and the contingency of today’s sexual values and ideas. In each episode, we synthesize complex histories in engaging ways by highlighting compelling human stories. We incorporate the voices of the historical subjects by conducting original interviews and utilizing rich audio archives. We also feature interviews with leading scholars who contextualize the stories we tell and highlight their broader significance.
How does podcasting change the way you practice intellectual history?
Petrzela: For me, I am not sure if podcasting has changed the way I write history, but it has certainly deepened my understanding of the many topics we cover, and affirmed my ability to speak to a wider range of cultural and political phenomena than those that are the focus of my scholarly research. That might seem obvious, but as scholars we are trained never to open our mouths or write a sentence unless we have done years of research on the topic. While that is of course for very good reason, I think it can serve to silence insights from historians that can really positively inform the public discourse. The podcast has taught me that scholarly writing is far from the only register in which I can or should express myself. Having to crank out a podcast every week also has taught me that keeping up momentum on a project – something easy to forget on what can be long, scholarly, slogs–is vital to sustaining my interest, and to doing my best work!
Hartman: Podcasting doesn’t necessarily change the way that I practice intellectual history but it does make me focus even more on something that I have long emphasized: writing about topics that interest many people, and in a way that many people can read. I think I came to podcasting because it accentuates these things that I have long sought to emphasize in my work.
Sehat: I’m not sure that podcasting changes the way that I practice intellectual history. One of the things I like about intellectual history is that it is a border field. A person can read philosophy, political history, social theory, rhetoric, you name it, while doing intellectual history. I find that an interview podcast allows a similar range. If someone has an idea, and every intellectual does, then it falls within my purview. Both intellectual history and interview podcasting allow a kind of professional dilettantism that I find liberating.
Frank: One of the best parts of working on Sexing History is having the opportunity to produce intellectual work with a team. While much of academic work is solitary, we thrive on collaboration. Through Sexing History we’ve been able to work with an incredible team of producers and interns. Being able to workshop ideas, share resources, and get feedback on drafts has made working on Sexing History a fun and satisfying communal endeavor. Because our audiences are listeners, not readers, we have shifted how we convey historical arguments and narratives. We have to be much more direct and economical with our language. The story has to be streamlined and can only include the most important details. We have to strategically repeat key information so that audio continuity is maintained. And perhaps most challenging, we have to ruthlessly cut all those amazing little tangents and details that we fall in love with but are inessential to the story.
What advice do you have for scholars interested in creating podcasts or using new media in the classroom?
Petrzela: The podcast space is more crowded than when we launched in 2016, so in some ways it is harder to get an audience, but there is also much more interest in the form. I would get REALLY clear on the goals and audience of your podcast, and make a consistent schedule for episode releases. It doesn’t have to be weekly, but your listeners should know when they can expect to hear from you.I never appreciated until hearing from listeners how much we become part of their “Tuesday routine,” whether it’s a soundtrack for a commute, a run, or doing chores!
Hartman: My advice is to just go ahead and do it. You might find that you’re good at it. At the very least you might have fun. I’m not sure we’re very good at it, but I can tell you we have a lot of fun making Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.
Sehat: I have the usual kind of advice. Pick a format and stick to it. Make sure your content is interesting to more than five people. Or, alternatively, find your niche and work it. Feel free to avoid intellectual pretension and academic stuffiness. If you are doing an interview podcast, allow yourself to ask a stupid question. Don’t be afraid to be wrong or to expose your ignorance. Don’t write out your questions beforehand. Pay some attention to the audio, not because a listener will stay for good audio but if a person has to listen through bad audio, they might turn off. Have serious fun.
Frank: We believe that taking advantage of new media and speaking to a broader public is vital to defending the value of the humanities as well as an education in the liberal arts, so we would absolutely encourage scholars to take advantage of the digital humanities. That said, it’s important to recognize going into any new media project that it will be much more time consuming (and likely more expensive) than you expect. Try to identify a team of people to work with so that you don’t become overwhelmed and can keep each other motivated and on-task. Know that in writing for a broader audience you will have to streamline your story or issue and cut out a lot of information that you might include in an academic text. It’s also important to take risks and learn from your mistakes.
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