Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) - podcast cover

Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Robert Harrisonentitled-opinions.com
The narcotic of intelligent conversation

Episodes

Chloe Veltman on the Human Voice

Chloe Veltman's articles have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in such publications as The New York Times (Bay Area culture correspondent,) The Los Angeles Times, American Theatre Magazine, BBC Classical Music Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Magazine, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Gramophone Magazine, Angeleno Magazine, Dwell Magazine, The […]

Jun 27, 2012

Ewa Domanska on Post-humanism

Ewa Domanska is affiliated with the Anthropology Department, CREEES and Europe Center at Stanford. Her teaching and research interests include comparative theory of the human and social sciences, history and theory of historiography, posthumanities and ecological humanities. She is cooperating with Stanford since 2000. Domanska holds her permament position at the Department of History, Adam […]

Jun 06, 2012

Gabriella Safran on Listening

Gabriella Safran received her BA with honors in Soviet and East European Studies from Yale University and her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 1998. Safran has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent book, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is […]

May 30, 2012

Andrew Hui on Petrarch and Petrarchism

Andrew Hui received his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton in 2009. Since then, he has been teaching at Stanford’s Introduction to Humanities program. In July he will join the inaugural faculty of the new Yale-NUS College, a joint collaboration between Yale U and National U of Singapore to create a liberal arts college in […]

May 23, 2012

EO listener Sasha Borovik on Life, Literature, and Lermontov

Sasha was born in western Ukraine when it was a part of the Soviet Union. In early youth, he recognized the deficiencies of the communist system and found his refuge in the vast corpus of Russian literature. After a fall-out with the pro-communist administration of his university in Moscow in 1989, he had illegally crossed […]

May 16, 2012

Leah DeVun on Hermaphroditism

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she teaches women's and gender history. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2004. Her first book, “Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages,” was published by Columbia University Press in 2009. She has […]

May 09, 2012

Tanya Luhrmann on Magic, God, and the Supernatural

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Stanford Psychology Department. She received her PhD from Cambridge University in 1986. Her books include “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft,” (Harvard, 1989); “The Good Parsi” (Harvard 1996); “Of Two Minds” (Knopf 2000) and “When […]

May 02, 2012

Debra Satz on John Rawls

Debra Satz, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, is the senior associate dean for the humanities and arts. Satz, a philosophy professor, directs the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. She earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and a doctorate in philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. […]

Apr 25, 2012

Hans Sluga on Michel Foucault

Autobiographical notes from Professor Sluga's departmental website: I was born and grew up in Germany and though I have lived since then in the English-speaking world I remain considerably influenced by German culture and thought. Through an early education in the classical languages I became interested in philosophy (both ancient Greek and German). I initially […]

Apr 18, 2012

Ursula Heise on Extinction

Ursula Heise received Master's degrees from UC-Santa Barbara and the University of Cologne in Germany before receiving her PhD from Stanford University in 1993. She specializes in contemporary American and European literature and literary theory; her major fields of interest are theories of modernization, postmodernization and globalization, ecology and ecocriticism, literature and science, narrative theory, […]

Apr 11, 2012

Stephen Hinton on Nietzsche and Wagner

STEPHEN HINTON is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. Professor of Music and, by courtesy, German, he also serves as the Denning Family Director of the Arts Initiative and the Stanford Institute for Creative and the Arts (SiCa). From 2006-2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts in the School […]

Nov 30, 2011

Dr. Larry Zaroff on Medicine and the Humanity

Larry Zaroff is a Senior Research Scholar with the Center for Biomedical Ethics and also a Consulting Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and the Program in Human Biology. Recently, he was selected to receive the Human Biology Award for Excellence in Faculty Advising. He has also been chosen as Associated Students of Stanford University […]

Nov 23, 2011

Georges Lavaudant on a Life in Theater

Georges Lavaudant is one of the most renowned theater directors in France today. Over the course of his career, he has directed the Théâtre national populaire at Villeurbanne and the Théâtre de l'Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, among others. He has directed and acted in countless plays and operas over the years. Some of his productions include […]

Nov 16, 2011

Richard Martin on Homeric Epics

Richard Martin is Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981 and has also taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley. Among his publications are the books “Healing, Sacrifice, and Battle: Amechania and Related Concepts in Early Greek Poetry” (1983), “The Language of Heroes: Speech and […]

Nov 16, 2011

Martin Lewis on Geography

Martin W. Lewis is lecturer in international history and interim director of the program in International Relations at Stanford University. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Environmental Studies in 1979, and received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in geography in 1987. His dissertation, and first book, “Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital, […]

Nov 09, 2011

Denise Gigante on John Keats

Denise Gigante is a professor in the English Department at Stanford University and teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on Romanticism. Her books include “The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George” (Harvard UP, 2011), “Life: Organic Form and Romanticism” (Yale UP, 2009), “The Great Age of the English Essay: An […]

Nov 02, 2011

Richard Saller on the Ancient Rome

Richard Saller is the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences at Stanford University. He is also the Kleinheinz Family Professor of European Studies as well as Professor of Classics and History. Dean Saller received Bachelor’s degrees in both History and Greek at the University of Illinois in […]

Oct 25, 20111 hr 3 min

Adrian Daub on Hegel

Adrian Daub is Assistant Professor of German at Stanford University. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. He is the author, among other things, of a German-language study on the cultural reception of four-handed piano playing, “Zwillingshafte Gebärden – Zur […]

Oct 19, 2011

Patrick Hunt on the Rosetta Stone

Patrick Hunt earned a Ph.D. from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, University of London in 1991. He has been teaching humanities, the arts, archaeology and mythology at Stanford University since 1993. His Hannibal Expedition was sponsored in 2007-2008 by the National Geographic Society’s Expedition Council. He is Director of the Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project 1994-2011. […]

Oct 12, 2011

Thomas Sheehan on Phenomenology

Thomas Sheehan is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford and specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph.D. from Fordham […]

Oct 05, 2011

Sonia Korn-Grimani on her memoir of the Holocaust

In this conversation Christy Wampole talks to Sonia Korn-Grimani about her memoir recounting her experiences during her escape from Nazi-Germany and during the German occupation of Belgium. Sonia was born in 1931 and has lived all over the world, she has a PhD in French literature and is an accomplished singer. The episode includes some […]

Apr 25, 2011

Stuart Edelstein on the Human Brain

Stuart J. Edelstein received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1967. Following a post-doctoral year at the Pasteur Institute in the laboratory of Jacques Monod, he joined the faculty of Cornell University in the Section of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, where he became Professor in 1977 and served as […]

Apr 05, 2011

Jay Kadis on Psychedelic Rock

Jay Kadis was born in Oakland, California. He has played guitar since high school, initially with Misanthropes, a popular bay area band of the late 1960s, whose highlights included playing the Fillmore Auditorium and opening for Muddy Waters. Jay has written and performed original rock music with several bands, including Urban Renewal and Offbeats. He […]

Mar 29, 2011

Sarah Carey on Italian Cinema

Sarah Carey specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature, visual culture and cinema. She received her B.A. from Stanford University in 2002, her M.A. from UCLA in 2007, and her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2010. Her current book project analyzes how photography has met with artistic and literary aspirations in order to collectively explore Italy's […]

Mar 22, 2011

Rush Rehm on Greek Tragedy

Professor of Drama and Classics at Stanford University, Rush Rehm is the author of Aeschylus' Oresteia: A Theatre Version (Melbourne 1978), Greek Tragic Theatre (Routledge: London 1992), Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 1994), The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 2002), and Radical […]

Mar 15, 2011

Blair Hoxby on Aristotle’s Poetics

Blair Hoxby studies the literature and culture of the long seventeenth century. Two of his foremost interests are the commercial culture and the theatrical practices of the period. His book Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) examines the impact of the commercial revolution on writings […]

Mar 08, 20111 hr 2 min

Lyonel Trouillot on Haiti and Haitian literature

Lyonel Trouillot was born in Port-au-Prince in 1956. Although several members of his family were lawyers and he studied law at university, he eventually identified and pursued a greater passion: writing. A poet, novelist, journalist, literary critic, and writer of song lyrics, Trouillot is a prolific member of the Haitian writing community. Several of his […]

Mar 01, 20111 hr 8 min

Christy Wampole on the Nouveau Roman

The Nouveau Roman flourished in France roughly from the 1950s through the 1970s. The loosely associated figures who acted as protagonists of the New Novel include Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean Ricardou, Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, and others. The New Novel took issue with the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel, best represented […]

Feb 22, 2011

Alexander Nehamas on Beauty

Alexander Nehamas received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1971 and joined the faculty of the philosophy department at Princeton in 1990. He is also Professor of the Humanities and of Comparative Literature. His interests include Greek philosophy, philosophy of art, European philosophy and literary theory. His books include The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from […]

Feb 15, 2011