Discovery & Inspiration
Discovery & Inspiration asks “What can we learn by talking to scholars about their research? What makes them so passionate about the subjects they study? What is it like to make a new discovery? To answer a confounding question?” For over 40 years the National Humanities Center has been a home away from home for scholars from around the world—historians and philosophers, scholars of literature and music and art and dozens of other fields. Join us as we sit down with scholars to discuss their work—to better understand the questions that intrigue and perplex them, the passion that drives them, and how their scholarship may change the ways we think about the world around us.
Episodes
February 8, 2025 • 30 mins
As executive director of Tulsa Educare, Cindy Decker leads one of the nation’s premier early childhood education programs which aims to break the cycle of poverty in Tulsa.
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February 8, 2025 • 41 mins
Writer and political commentator Jim Hightower has garnered a national following as a radio personality, syndicated columnist, and author speaking to the concerns of everyday Americans in much the same way as Woody Guthrie, the artist and activist who inspires him.
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February 8, 2025 • 43 mins
Best-selling author Michael Wallis is a leading chronicler of the American West and its place in the American imaginary—with books on everything from Billy the Kid, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and Wilma Mankiller to the legacy of America’s “Mother Road,” Route 66.
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February 8, 2025 • 29 mins
Jeff Stava is Chief Program Officer of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Chief Operating Officer at the Tulsa Community Foundation, and Executive Director of the Gathering Place, Tulsa’s 100-acre, riverfront park which was named USA Today’s top new attraction for 2019, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Places in the World.
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February 8, 2025 • 43 mins
As Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Chuck Hoskin Jr. has not only helped improve the economic and physical well-being of his fellow Cherokees, he has also secured the largest language investment in the tribe’s history to expand Cherokee cultural preservation.
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February 7, 2025 • 48 mins
Community activist and entrepreneur Onikah Asamoa-Caesar is the founder and CEO of Fulton Street Books & Coffee, a retail business and gathering place in the heart of Tulsa’s historic Greenwood neighborhood.
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January 30, 2025 • 45 mins
Bill Leuchtenburg speaks about presidential history at the National Humanities Center Board of Trustees reception at the Morgan Library, New York, NY on June 8, 2016.
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November 3, 2023 • 22 mins
Theatrical productions allow playwrights and audiences alike to engage with historical and contemporary social realities. But what are the consequences when particular types of dramatic texts and performances are inadequately disseminated and preserved? Elena Machado Sáez (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is analyzing the ways that Latinx theater in the United States depicts forms of activism and resistance while building shared archives and c...
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November 3, 2023 • 21 mins
In March 1850, five men and two women were photographed in the studio of South Carolina artist Joseph Zealy. When these daguerreotypes were uncovered in 1976, they quickly became some of the best-known pre-Civil War images of enslaved African Americans. Gregg Hecimovich (NHC Fellow, 2015–16; 2022–23) is asking important questions about why these images were captured, how they were lost for so long, and what they might tell us about...
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November 3, 2023 • 19 mins
As an art form, opera has proven to be simultaneously entertaining and relatable to diverse audiences, even though it has also been characterized by associations with whiteness and elitism. Naomi André (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is working to tell a more comprehensive and inclusive story of this genre by constructing a history of Blackness in opera from the nineteenth century to the present.
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November 3, 2023 • 25 mins
The British writer, reformer, and criminologist George Cecil Ives lived through a transformation in our collective understanding of sexuality. Born in 1867, Ives found early inspiration in the Classical tradition and witnessed the rise of sexology and psychoanalysis before his death in the mid-twentieth century. But Ives did not simply observe these social changes; he chronicled them exhaustively through his published works, corres...
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November 3, 2023 • 22 mins
In 1996, an exhibition entitled “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists,” was produced for the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s contribution to the Olympic games held in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, Jontyle Theresa Robinson (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is undertaking a multi-tiered initiative to reflect upon and advance the work of that exhibition thirty years later.
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October 28, 2023 • 19 mins
The influence that Nina Simone and Langston Hughes have had on American music, literature, and culture can hardly be overstated. However, the relationship between these two figures has received little to no attention from scholars to date, despite their long history of collaboration. W. Jason Miller (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is conducting research into this partnership in order to inform new understandings about the intersections betwe...
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November 21, 2022 • 43 mins
This lecture illuminates the field of international possibility seen by a leading fraction of young Americans in the 1920s. It offers a counter-narrative to the well-worn account of American “expatriates” who succumbed to the seductions of Paris and soon returned home chastened. A far larger stratum of would-be writers lived outside the United States without desire to be “expatriates,” found vocations in journalism, brought the wor...
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November 7, 2022 • 27 mins
When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, it not only revolutionized international trade, but brought about new developments in public health. While diseases like yellow fever and malaria were seen as an inherent threat of “the tropics” by the Americans and French, the process of constructing the canal actually created conditions in which such diseases could proliferate more freely.
In this podcast, Paul S. Sutter (NHC Fellow, 2021–22...
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October 31, 2022 • 25 mins
For the past twenty years, Nigerian filmmaking has dominated media production in Africa and among African diasporic communities. One of the most influential figures in this industry is the writer, director, and producer Femi Odugbemi, whose work is an example of the "socially responsible cinema" that has been under-explored in scholarly analyses of Nollywood.
In this podcast, Paul Ushang Ugor (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate profe...
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October 24, 2022 • 21 mins
Nineteenth-century American paintings frequently depict foreign settings, from the Caribbean to the Arctic. Many of these artworks seem to reveal moments of cultural exchange or scientific inquiry, but they have rarely been seen as evidence of the growing imperialist tendencies of the United States throughout this century.
In this podcast, Maggie Cao (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at the University of North ...
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October 17, 2022 • 22 mins
In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic ideas based on the work of Sigmund Freud were taken up, translated, and even challenged by practitioners from a variety of geographic regions and backgrounds. However, the importance of psychoanalytic thought in China has not always been given adequate attention.
In this podcast, Howard Chiang (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis...
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October 11, 2022 • 24 mins
Widely understood as a destination for leisure and pleasure, the Caribbean has drawn visitors from the global north for over a century. Women have played a central role in establishing this image of the islands, from the proliferation of women's travel writing beginning in the late nineteenth century to their active roles in shaping the tourism and hospitality industry.
In this podcast, Elizabeth S. Manley (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), a...
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October 4, 2022 • 14 mins
In the 1772 court case “Somerset v Stewart,” an English court found that the concept of slavery had no basis in English law. Although this case has long been linked to the eventual abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Britain, the emancipation of enslaved persons was a long and complex process.
In this podcast, Tony Frazier (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at North Carolina Central University, discusses th...
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