In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the s ... Show More
Oct 7
Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)
The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. In The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten His ... Show More
49m 59s
Oct 2
Erin M.B. O'Halloran, "East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Between the First and Second World Wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nations, rather than colonies subject to the control of London. Sometimes, these thinkers found refuge and common cause in others else ... Show More
57m 35s
Sep 30
Matt Myers, "The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent. New forms of mobilisation led by female, immigrant, and young wage-earners seemed to ... Show More
1h 13m
Sep 2023
Episode 170: Printers, Plague and Poets
In this episode, we examine the connection between poetry and plague in the early 1590s. An outbreak of the recurring sickness contributed to Shakespeare’s early career as a poet, and that poetry likely included his many sonnets. We also examine how an old acquaintance from Shake ... Show More
1h 17m
Jan 2025
Andrew Smith, "Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmil ... Show More
1h 12m
Jul 2024
Steven E. Lindquist, "The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya" (SUNY Press, 2024)
In The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya (SUNY Press, 2024), Steven E. Lindquist investigates the intersections between historical context and literary production in the "life" of Yājñavalkya, the most important ancient Indian literary figure prior to the Buddha. Known for his sharp t ... Show More
1h 4m
May 2024
Constantine P. Cavafy — Poems as Teachers | Ep 3
We ask questions to find out the facts, but what if you can’t trust the answers, the questions, or the person who's asking the questions? In Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” translated by Evan Jones, leaders exercise a sinister kind of violence — they’ve take ... Show More
17m 23s
Jun 2025
Basma Al Dajani, "The Arab Andalusian Love Poetry: A Study of the Interaction Between Place and Man Through Time" (AU Cairo Press, 1994)
In this episode of Unlocking Academia, host Raja Aderdor speaks with Dr. Basma A. S. Dajani, Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, in a sweeping conversation on Arab-Andalusian love poetry and the cultural, linguistic, and emotional legacies it continues to inspire. Rooted ... Show More
34m 12s
Jun 2024
Beowulf: everything you wanted to know
Beowulf is the most famous Old English epic poem, relating the adventures of the eponymous hero as he battles beasts and dragons in a pre-Viking Scandinavian world. However, it's so much more than just a story of men and monsters, as Heather O'Donoghue reveals in this conversatio ... Show More
39m 27s
Feb 2025
Alcools, by Guillaume Apollinaire. Partie III.
Apollinaire is a pivotal figure in the history of French poetry. Friend of Picasso, albeit a sometimes volatile one, inventor of the term 'surrealism' and the poem without punctuation, he advocated a poetry that was direct and intuitive, free of any refined intellectualis ... Show More
46m 57s