Podcast – Tanner Humanities Center

Real Housewives, Real Humanities, with Jordan Rullo, Marcie Young Cancio, and Renato Olmedo-González

Categories: Podcast

In this episode, we discuss the Tanner Humanities Center’s symposium—Receipts, Proof, Timeline: How We Watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City—with Jordan Rullo (Department of Psychology and therapist), Marcie Young Cancio (Department of Communication and founder of Amplify Utah), and Renato Olmedo-González (Salt Lake City Arts Council). They explore the underground sophistication of trash […]

May 25, 2026

Scoring systems, games, and value capture, with Thi Nguyen and Scott Black

Categories: Podcast

How can scoring systems make games feel so joyful, fluid, and alive, yet drain the life from public institutions and everyday work? This is one of the central questions of a new book by University of Utah philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. In The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, published this year by […]

April 21, 2026

Nora Lange, author of Day Care and Us Fools, with Erin Beeghly

Categories: Podcast

Nora Lange, author of Us Fools (2024), discusses her new collection of short stories, Day Care, with Erin Beeghly (Department of Philosophy). Their conversation touches on female desire, motherhood, mischief, and the strange pressures of contemporary life. They discuss the surreal charge of stories like “Hot Spot,” the autofictional elements of the title story, and Lange’s […]

April 2, 2026

How we watch the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City – Marcie Young-Cancio, Robert Carson, and Scott Black

Categories: Podcast

In anticipation of our symposium on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City on April 10, Marcie Young-Cancio, Robert Carson, and Scott Black discuss the show from a humanities perspective, examining its treatment of faith, femininity, Utah culture, entrepreneurship, fan loyalty, and camp sensibility. Marcie Young-Cancio is Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Communication […]

March 17, 2026

Enshittification, with Cory Doctorow and Matthew Potolsky

Categories: Podcast

In this episode, Matt Potolsky (Professor of English) talks with writer and activist Cory Doctorow about digital privacy, platform decay, and the politics of monopoly. Drawing on his recent book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow argues that the erosion of privacy is inseparable from the rise of […]

March 5, 2026

Great Books: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf — Jessica Straley and Scott Black

Categories: Podcast

In a new series of episodes, The Virtual Jewel Box will feature conversations about great books. Scott Black and Jessica Straley discuss Mrs. Dalloway as a novel of thresholds: between past and present, sound and silence, intimacy and distance. Reading closely from the opening line through Big Ben’s leaden circles, they show how Woolf’s stream […]

February 3, 2026

Aesthetics and empathy, with Joseph Metz and Scott Black

Categories: Podcast

In this episode, Scott Black talks with literary scholar Joseph Metz about his book The Feeling of the Form: Empathy and Aesthetics from Büchner to Rilke (Cornell University Press), a cultural and intellectual history of empathy that traces the concept back to nineteenth-century German art theory. Drawing on close readings of Georg Büchner, Adalbert Stifter, […]

January 8, 2026

Mentorship and solidarity, with Leandra Hernández and Omi Salas-SantaCruz

Categories: Podcast

In this episode, Omi Salas-SantaCruz talks with Leandra Hernández about Queer, Women of Color, and Critical Approaches to Feminist Mentorship and Pedagogy (University of Illinois Press), co-edited by Hernández, Stevie M. Munz, and Jessica Pauly. Along the way, they discuss the power of feminist mentorship, the ecological webs of care that sustain scholars and students, and […]

December 4, 2025

Tuning your ear to conceptual music, with Craig Dworkin and Scott Black

Categories: Podcast

In this episode, Scott Black talks with poet and critic Craig Dworkin about his new book, The Sound of Thinking: A Listener’s Companion to Conceptual Music (University of Chicago Press), on music made from rules, systems, and procedures rather than personal expression. They explore pieces like György Ligeti’s 100 metronomes, Steve Reich’s swinging-microphone Pendulum Music, […]

November 20, 2025

Translating Homer’s Odyssey, with Daniel Mendelsohn and Jordan Johansen

Categories: Podcast

Daniel Mendelsohn discusses his new translation of Homer’s Odyssey (University of Chicago Press) with Jordan Johansen, Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the University of Utah. They discuss the musicality of translating Homer’s poetry for the human voice, the discovery of sarcastic swineherd personalities, and the 15-hour marathon […]

November 3, 2025