"Best of" the C19 Podcast

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Networked Connections: Exploring Emily Dickinson

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Every week, back in 2018, Ivy Schweitzer and her team of students at Dartmouth College selected several poems and letters written by Emily Dickinson in 1862, a year of creativity “at the White Heat.” They framed these poems with a summary of the news of the time, literary culture, biographical events in the Dickinson circle, a brief survey of more recent critical responses, and personal reflection. This episode explores that cumulative creation, called the “White Heat” blog. The project, which had the goal of creating original and immersive contexts in which to read Dickinson remains an exemplar of digital humanities pedagogy. Members of the team, including Schweitzer, Victoria Corwin, a (then) senior undergraduate, and Joe Waring, a Dartmouth graduate, talk with Michael Amico (Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development) about their experiences blogging Dickinson in what the team regards as an experiment in public humanities and a model for doing scholarship and experiential learning in the digital age. This episode originally appeared on September 28, 2018. It was produced by Michael Amico and Conrad Winslow. Post-production help from Doug Guerra. You can visit the White Heat blog here.  

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"The N Word in the Classroom: Just Say No"

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The N-word is here to stay, and so are debates about it. However, scholars and teachers don’t need the word to disappear so much as they need to be more deliberate and intellectually rigorous in handling it. In this episode, Koritha Mitchell (Ohio State University) suggests that students and faculty members should not be subjected to hate speech in the classroom just because it appears in the texts we study. She shares her deep disappointment with how little white instructors as well as those in other dominant identity categories have thought about their use of slurs in their classes and proposes solutions to improve pedagogical practices. She details her own classroom policies and offers examples of how the policies function in texts by Mark Twain and James Baldwin. We also hear Mitchell's former students discuss how her policy transformed their learning experiences and critical thinking during and beyond her courses. Throughout, Mitchell identifies how intellectually lazy ways of handing racial slurs result from, and fuel, that which makes our institutions unjust. This episode originally appeared on March 4, 2019. It was produced by Xine Yao, Paul Kotheimer, and Koritha Mitchell. Post-production by Xine Yao.

View Koritha Mitchell's classroom covenant here.

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Tena, Too, Sings America  

 

How does an enslaved woman's song from 1830s in Georgia end up on a 1950s radio program in South Africa and in a modern singing class? This is the surprising story of an African-born woman named Tena, whose music has echoed for generations across continents, airwaves, and even college classrooms. Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University) first encountered Tena’s song in a book of sheet music by Carl Sandburg but a series of events led her to uncover details about Tena’s life in living memories of her enslavers’ descendants and in archival recordings and documents. This episode is about Tena's life and legacy, the challenges of researching enslaved women’s lives, and how sound and performance can open up new ways of engaging with the past.

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This episode was created and produced by Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University) with post-production help from Kristie Schlauraff. Episode transcript available here.

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