High Theory

Nov 01 2024 144 ep. 17 mins 99
High Theory Podcast artwork

High Theory is a produced and edited by Kim Adams and Saronik Bosu, two tired academics trying to save critique from itself, along with two amazing collaborators, Júlia Irion Martins and Nathan Kim. In this podcast, we get high on the substance of theory, and we try to explain difficult ideas from the academy with irreverence. You can learn more about us on our website, or find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

  Society & Culture  Arts  Science
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Ghosts In Our Fields

Nov 01 2024 28 mins  
High Theory returns with a series of haunting concepts, places, and figures from our former guests. We asked folks to call in with something spookworthy (neologism!) from their fields – real or imagined specters, scary ideas, anything that could haunt, disorient, unsettle, horrify. And we got a full seance worth of ghosts. Listen if you dare! This episode features (in order of ap

Inhuman

May 14 2024 20 mins  
In this episode of High Theory, Rasheed Tazudeen tells us about the inhuman. The inhuman offers a way of moving beyond the legacies of humanism and across categories and scales of being. Thinking with the inhuman world, from spools of thread to microplastics, helps us try and think otherwise about the complex assemblages that shape our lives. If you want to learn more, check out Ra

Animals

Apr 08 2024 18 mins  
In this episode of High Theory, Mackenzie Cooley talks about animals. The animal lies at the center of science and the human, from imperial conquest and Enlightenment thought to the creatures on our dinner plates and beside us at the table. The practices of animal breeding and the politics of making life are, in Mackenzie’s account, key to understanding the history of race as a c

Melodrama

Mar 24 2024 22 mins  
We often misuse the word melodrama with abandon, especially to characterize other people’s behaviors, but Greg Vargo defines it for us once and for all. Emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the predominant Western theatrical form, it is a genre of crisis. To that end, it employed hyperbolic language, extreme situations, extraordinary coincidences, stark oppositi

Close Reading

Mar 02 2024 15 mins  
In this episode of High Theory, Jonathan Kramnick talks about Close Reading. Contrary to the name, it is less a form of slow or focused reading than an immersive practice of writing. The classic methodology of New Criticism has become, in Kramnick’s estimation, the shared foundation of literary studies in the university. Our conversation was inspired by Jonathan’s new book, Cri

Criticism

Feb 15 2024 21 mins  
In this episode of High Theory, Matt Seybold tells us about Criticism, the glue that holds the bricks of culture together. Cultural critics are a necessary component of the intellectual ecosystem, who have the power to analyze both the material conditions and the myths that make up our world. Matt is the host of the American Vandal Podcast at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at El

Teaching

Jan 12 2024 19 mins  
In this special episode of High Theory, Ramsés Martínez Barquero and Abigail Cowan interview their graduate student colleagues about teaching. They turn our attention to graduate study as one of the foundational aspects in building academic knowledge, and show us graduate instructors encountering the classroom as a learning environment for teachers and students. Abigail and Ramse

Plot

Jan 04 2024 18 mins  
In this episode of High Theory, Pardis Dabashi tells us about plot. A plot consists of a change with stakes that establish norms. This seemingly simple structure shapes novels, films, politics, and our world, from easy seductions of comfort to difficult promises of liberation. In the episode, Pardis references Thomas Edison’s 1903 film, Electrocuting an Elephant, which is super s

Nature-Study

Dec 29 2023 22 mins  
In this episode, John Linstrom tells us about Nature-Study, an educational movement that began in the rural classrooms of American Progressive Era. It takes students and learners of all kinds out of the classroom, away from the textbook, and into the world, to observe and learn. It offers us a mode of attunement to the world that we might use to heal the divide between rural and ur

Sisterhood

Dec 16 2023 20 mins  
In this episode of High Theory, Katherine Turk tells us about Sisterhood, a familial metaphor used to evoke gendered solidarity in women’s movement of the mid-sixties and seventies, and a utopian ideal of equality within the human family. It’s a universalizing but aspirational concept that helped feminists build a political coalition. Our conversation is based upon Katherine’