Humanities on the High Plains

May 06 2024 18 ep. 52 mins 1
Humanities on the High Plains Podcast artwork

Humanities on the High Plains is a podcast focusing on humanities scholarship, with a special emphasis on topics relevant to the Texas Panhandle and the High Plains. Hosted by Ryan M. Brooks, Assistant Professor of English at West Texas A&M University, each episode features in-depth conversations with scholars exploring new ideas and methods in disciplines like literature, film studies, and cultural history.

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Ep. 18 For the Record

May 06 2024 55 mins  
In March 2023, The Canadian Record — the weekly newspaper of rural Canadian, TX, population 2,300 — suspended publication after 130 years in print. Ryan’s guests this episode are Laurie Ezzell Brown, longtime editor and publisher of The Record, and Heather Courtney, the award-winning director and producer of the 2023 documentary short For the Record, which streams online from

Ep. 17 George Saunders

Mar 26 2024 42 mins  
Before he was a MacArthur Genius or a Booker Prize-winner, George Saunders was a songwriter, an oil-field worker, and a slaughterhouse “knuckle-puller,” not to mention an MA student at what was then West Texas State University. In this in-depth interview, Amarillo College’s Chris Hudson joins me, Ryan Brooks, as we speak with the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of Decem

Ep. 16 Shadow of the New Deal

Dec 05 2023 56 mins  
The history of public media is the history of fidelity to an idea: access to public education is “not only a service but a right.” On this episode we’re joined by Dr. Josh Shepperd, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Josh descr

Ep. 15 The Thirsty Llano Estacado

May 16 2023 48 mins  
Ryan’s guests this episode are Dr. Timothy M. Foster, former WT prof and currently a Spanish teacher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and Dr. John Beusterien, Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Tim and John come on the podcast to discuss their article, “The Thirsty Llano Estacado: The Manuel Maés Ballad Corpus,” published in 2022 in The Great Plains Quarterly. This

Ep. 14 The ERA in the West

Mar 13 2023 33 mins  
Our guest this episode is WT history professor Dr. Chelsea Ball, author of “‘I Oppose the ERA, but I Do Approve of Equal Rights for Women’: Gender and Politics in the Aftermath of the Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the U.S. West.” This piece can be found in The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink and published by the Univ

Ep. 13 Dirty Knowledge

Dec 14 2022 35 mins  
Ryan’s guest on this episode is Dr. Julia Schleck, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Schleck joins us to discuss her book, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, published in January 2022 as part of the University of Nebraska Press’s “Provocations” series. The book critiques traditiona

Ep. 12 You Will Never Be One of Us

Oct 22 2022 52 mins  
In this episode, Ryan speaks with his WT colleague Dr. Timothy Paul Bowman, historian and author of You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, a Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservativism, published in 2022 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Bowman’s book tells the story of Wayne Woodward, who in 1975 was fired from his job as an English teacher at La

Ep. 11 Running Out

May 13 2022 46 mins  
On this episode, Ryan is joined by two of his WT colleagues — Dr. Nathan Howell, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Dr. Erik Crosman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences — and Dr. Darryl Birkenfeld, executive director of the nonprofit organization, Ogallala Commons. We discuss anthropologist Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the H

Ep. 10 Chicana/o Uprising

Mar 15 2022 43 mins  
In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Joel Zapata to discuss his essay “The South-by-Southwest Borderlands’ Chicana/o Uprising: the Brown Berets, Black and Brown Alliances, and the Fight against Police Brutality in West Texas.” The piece emerged out of Zapata’s involvement with the groundbreaking Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project and appears in Civil Rig

Ep. 9 The Great Cowboy Strike

Jan 18 2022 42 mins  
On this episode, Ryan is joined by Mark. A. Lause, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West (Verso, 2017). Taking its title from a major strike led by ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle in 1883, the book traces the broader history of post-Civil War labor radicalism and thir