Episode 144: Superman (2025) with John Wyatt Greenlee, Colin Colbourn, and Alan Malfavon
This week John Wyatt Greenlee, Colin Colbourn, and Alan Malfavon flyover to talk about James Gunn’s Superman, the need for heroes in everyday lives, and casting the rest of the DCU.
John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. But he is best well known for my work on the role of eels in pre-modern England from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. He is heavily engaged in outreach and public engagement to make the eel history more widely known, and to raise awareness for the role of eels as an endangered species. His work with eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker (click here for a full list of earned media)
He has kept up the public outreach part of my work, though, and he contines to write and talk about eels and eel history. He is (mostly) no longer an academic, however. The collapse of the academic job market and the advent of COVID just as he completed his PhD saw to that. That saddens him; he believes we are at a point in time when we are badly in need of trained and thoughtful historians.
Dr. Colin Colbourn is Project Recover’s Lead Historian and a Postdoctoral Researcher with the University of Delaware. Since 2016, he has managed historical operations including archival research, data management, case analysis, and field investigations. Through these efforts, Project Recover has developed a massive internal archive comprised of thousands of historical reports, maps, and images. Learn more about Colin and his work with MIA Families.
Dr. Alan Malfavon is an assistant professor of history at California State University-San Marcos. His research resituates Mexico’s socio-political, cultural, and economic networks with the Atlantic World and the Greater Caribbean, and it dissects and problematizes those networks by centering the Black and Afro-Mexican experience. His research interrogates and subverts archival silences that have erased Black and Afro-Mexican agency from narratives of Mexican identity and nation-state formation, seeking to diversify these narratives by foregrounding the voices, perspectives, and actions of Afro-descendants.