Episode 3: Up In The Air with Dr. Brett Rushforth
When I was a graduate student studying slavery in the Americas, there were a host of books you had to read. Among them was and is this dude, Brett Rushforth. Brett has since become a friend of mine and what you'll find when listening is that this guy is not only one of the smartest people working the field, he's a giving human being and I'm so flattered that he chose to sit down and talk about one of our mutual favorite films: Up in the Air. This episode is gonna surprise you when you see where it goes.
Dr. Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. He has published widely on early modern colonialism, slavery, material culture, legal history, and religion.
His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.
His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery.
He recently completed, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Beyond the Ocean: A New History of France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans from the late medieval period through Haitian independence in 1804. It will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2025.
Rushforth is Editor in Chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly, a peer-reviewed academic journal featuring original research and new perspectives on early modern art, literature, history, science, medicine, and material culture. He is also a faculty member (by courtesy) in the Van Hunnick History Department at the University of Southern California.
Before joining the Research Division at The Huntington, he taught at the College of William and Mary and the University of Oregon.
Episode 2: Chef with Dr. Emily Contois and Dr. Zenia Kish
Emily Contois, Ph.D., researches media within consumer culture, focusing on how identities are formed at the vital intersection of food, the body and ideas about health. She is the author of “Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture” (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) and co-editor of “Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation” (University of Illinois Press, 2022). Her current book project explores how ideas about elite athleticism have infiltrated everyday American life. A richly interdisciplinary scholar, her academic work has been published in Advertising & Society Quarterly, American Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Gastronomica and Fat Studies, among others.
A public expert on a wide variety of topics, she has written for NBC News, Jezebel, and Nursing Clio; been interviewed on podcasts, such as “The Sporkful,” “Gastropod,” “KCRW Good Food,” and “Bite Back with Abbey Sharp;” and appeared on “CBS This Morning” and “Ugly Delicious” on Netflix. Her media mentions include the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, Slate, and more. Deeply committed to her students, she teaches an array of critical media studies courses. As UTulsa’s faculty in residence, she lives on campus in community with students and has hosted more than 100 events in her home over the past three years.
Dr. Zenia Kish is an interdisciplinary scholar committed to publicly-engaged teaching and research that bridges the humanities and social sciences. Her work explores unconventional forms of media across global contexts, including the mediation of philanthropy and agriculture, and makes connections between digital media studies, strategic communication, critical finance studies, American studies, food and agriculture, and development. She is Associate Editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy, and serves on the boards of the Journal of Environmental Media and Communication and Race. Before joining Ontario Tech University, Zenia was Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where she also served as the Associate Director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.
Zenia completed her Master’s degree in Media Studies at Western University and her PhD in American Studies at New York University, before serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Thinking Matters program at Stanford University. Her research in strategic communication and critical finance studies converges around the media practices of financial actors working in philanthropy, impact investing, and international development, and has been published in Cultural Studies, Environment and Planning A, The Entangled Legacies of Empire, and elsewhere. Her current book project examines the media cultures of philanthropy and ethical investing in the decade following the 2007-08 financial crisis.
Zenia’s work on food, agriculture, and the environment explores representations of food and farming on social media as well as the socio-technical infrastructures reshaping the global agri-food system. Her co-edited book Food Instagram: Identity, Influence and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press 2022, with Emily Contois) offers innovative frameworks and case studies at the intersection of social media studies and food studies, and was awarded the 2023 Best Edited Volume Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. She is a member of the NSF-funded Agri-Food Technology Research Project (UC-AFTeR) based at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which examines how Silicon Valley is reshaping the food and ag tech sectors, including research on tech pitching practices and open data in food and agriculture. She also co-edited a special issue of New Media and Society on “farm media” with Benjamin Peters that opens up new lines of agricultural inquiry for media studies.
Media coverage of Zenia’s work on Food Instagram includes interviews on Life Matters (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Good Food (KCRW Los Angeles Public Radio), StudioTulsa (KWGS Public Radio Tulsa), Aca-Media podcast (Society for Cinema and Media Studies), and the New Books Network podcast. Her work has also been featured by Business Insider, Channel 8 Tulsa (ABC), and elsewhere.
While at the University of Tulsa, Zenia was involved in growing public humanities programming through the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, first as a seminar lead and then as Associate Director. In these roles, she organized numerous talks and events with public intellectuals, musicians, artists, and scholars, including a conference on the future of reproductive rights and freedoms and an expert roundtable on the war on Ukraine.
Episode 1: Black Panther with Dr. Walter Greason
Walter Greason is the founding scholar and historian of Afrofuturist Design. He is an author, editor, and contributor to more than twenty books, mostly notably the award-winning books Suburban Erasure, Illmatic Consequences, The Black Reparations Project, and The Graphic History of Hip Hop. His work on the Timothy Thomas Fortune Cultural Center has garnered international acclaim for the innovative use of digital technology, leading to multiple urban revitalization projects in Minnesota, Florida, New Jersey, and Louisiana. He appeared on dozens of mass media outlets in the United States and around the world.
He was a Future Faculty Fellow at Temple University where he completed his Ph.D. in History and contributed to President William J. Clinton's National Dialogue on Race. As a Presidential Scholar at Villanova University where he studied History, English, Philosophy, Peace and Justice Studies, and Africana Studies, he organized a social justice campaign that established the first Strategic Plan for Cultural Diversity in American history. The principles of the plan were adopted by the Board of Trustees in 2006 and led to a massive capital expansion of the university, culminating in the Vatican's election of Pope Leo XIV in 2025.
His most recent project, The Graphic History of Hip Hop, with Afrofuturist illustrator Tim Fielder, has been featured at the United Nations, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for African American History and Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Schomburg Center in the New York Public Library system, and San Diego Comic-Con in 2024.
He is the Wallace Endowed Chair of History in the Department of History at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and holds research affiliate positions with Brandeis University’s Institute for Economic and Racial Equity, Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, the Center for New American History at the University of Richmond, and the University of Minnesota’s College of Design.