Tag Archives: Podcast

Open Access Journals and Textbooks

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Nick ShockeyNicole Allen

 

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Colleges and universities face major financial challenges as state and federal funding levels fall and few new revenue sources can adequately fill the gap.  Tuition has already been raised to unsustainable levels, as aggregate student debt recently reached $1 trillion. Higher educational institutions are seeking to be more “entrepreneurial” in order to generate new revenues, but this is a rather slow process in most cases. These issues were pressing even before the housing meltdown in 2008. Now they are urgent.

With this context in mind, the Temple University Libraries are interested in exploring ways that the Internet can be used to reconceptualize and reconfigure how research and educational materials are delivered. If successful, this might both improve research and educational performance at the same time that costs are lowered. As part of the sixth annual Open Access Week (Oct. 22 – Oct. 28, 2012), the Temple University Libraries invited Nick Shockey, director of student advocacy for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and manager of the Right to Research Coalition, and Nicole Allen, director of Student PIRG’s Make Textbooks Affordable campaign, to discuss “The Connection between Open Access and Open Educational Resources: Exploring New Publishing Models.”

Before they’re presentation, they sat down to speak with me about open access journals and open educational resources.

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 —Fred Rowland

 

 

Whither the soul?

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Julien Musolino

 

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The growth of the cognitive and brain sciences has raised interesting questions about the brain and the mind.  No less, it raises interesting questions about traditional notions of the  soul.  Julien Musolino, professor of Psychology at Rutgers University and the director of its Psycholinguistics Laboratory, is interested in science in the public interest and in communicating scientific ideas to the general public.  He is writing a book on the soul for a general, popular audience which looks at the current scientific evidence for the soul’s existence.  Since I’m the classics, philosophy, and religion librarian – all disciplines that have had a long interest in the soul – I thought it was incumbent upon me to find out the latest on the soul.  Julien Musolino was kind enough to share a copy of his introduction with me and agree to an interview.

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—Fred Rowland

 

Philly’s New Urban Dining Room

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Can restaurants serve as a means of urban economic development? Sure seems like Philadelphia is trying, as restaurants proliferate in Center City and environs.  If you’re interested in studying this question, I recommend you look at Stephen Nepa’s 2012 dissertation, There Used to be Nowhere to Eat in this Town: restaurant-led development in postindustrial Philadelphia, available through the Temple University Libraries’ digital collections.

You can also read Stephen Nepa’s article in Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Fall 2011),  “The New Urban Dining Room: Sidewalk Cafes in Postindustrial Philadelphia” (Temple-only).  With over 300 sidewalk cafes opening up since the late 1990s, this is an important urban phenomenon that deserves study.  Why such an explosion?  Why did it take so long?  What does it mean for the future of our city?

I interviewed Stephen Nepa on July 19, 2012 to talk about “The New Urban Dining Room.”

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—Fred Rowland

 

 

Pennsylvania in Public Memory

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Journalism Professor Carolyn Kitch

Earlier this year, Carolyn Kitch’s book Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (print) (online-TU only) was published by the Penn State University Press. She investigated industrial heritage sites across the state in an attempt to understand how Pennsylvanians understood their state’s rich history of business and industry.  As one learns from her introduction, she visited 224 sites and events, including museums, heritage sites and festivals, worker memorials, and factory tours. She explains that,

What I did do, I hope, was to visit enough sites, talk to enough people, and read or view enough media to gain some sense of patterns in tourism, museum interpretation, memorials, and other forms of public memory of past industry. This book recounts the stories and imagery that I heard and saw repeatedly across the state and across industries.

On a personal note, I was drawn to Pennsylvania in Public Memory because I’m fascinated in general by the ways communities understand, interpret, and sometimes fantasize and mythologize their collective pasts.  I was also interested in learning whether an understanding of the last century of Pennsylvania industrial history — through sites, museums, and antique trains and trollies — might provide some insights on the way forward out of our current rather dark economic times.  Could the struggle of workers in the past give courage to the present? Could our industrial history provide inspiration and hope to Pennsylvanians?

There are many very good scholarly works coming out on Pennsylvania history and related topics these days, among which journalism professor Carolyn Kitch’s is a good example. I was very pleased that Professor Kitch agreed to speak with me from Harrisburg, via Skype, on Monday, July 9, 2012.

Below are some incidents and sites mentioned in our interview.
Lattimer Massacre
Homestead Strike
Anthrocite Museum
Drake Oil Museum
Grey Towers
Eckley Miners’ Village
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
Rivers of Steel National Heritage Center
Historic Bethlehem

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—Fred Rowland

Preaching Death

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Lucy BregmanProfessor Lucy Bregman of the Temple University Religion Department is the author of Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons (Baylor University Press, 2011). She uses collections of funeral sermons and manuals for practicing clergy as a lens through which to illuminate changing notions of death in American society. On Thursday, July 5, 2012 she stopped by my office to talk about her book. At the end of this fascinating interview, she strongly recommends that an interested scholar write a similar book on changes in notions of love and marriage using collections of marriage and wedding sermons and related clergy manuals. Perhaps a doctoral student looking for a good topic will do so.

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—Fred Rowland

Victorian Fetishism

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PetePeter Loganr Logan is a professor of English and the director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple University.  He is the author of Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (1997) and, more recently, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (2009).  On May 15, 2012, he stopped by my office to discuss Victorian Fetishism, which details the development of ideas about the primitive and how these concepts set the boundaries of culture in Victorian Britain.  Drawing from Lucretius, Vico, and Auguste Comte, Peter Logan explains how fetishism – the defining feature of culture’s absence – figured in the works of literary and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, realist novelist George Eliot, and anthropologist Edward Tylor.

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—Fred Rowland

1876 & 1976 Centennial Celebrations: The Interview

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On March 28, 2012, Paley Library welcomed Professor Susanna Gold, Assistant Professor of 19th and 20th century Art History at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, graduate student at Brown University, to discuss the 1876 Centennial and the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. The program was moderated by Paley Library Director of Communications Nicole Restaino.

Susanna Gold is currently at work on a book on the 1876 Centennial Exhibition for Penn State University Press. Since our interview, Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska completed her dissertation — “Bicentennial Memory: Postmodernity, Media, and Historical Subjectivity in the United States, 1966-1980″ — and was awarded her PhD from Brown University. (Congratulations, Malgorzata!)

After the completion of the program, Susanna Gold, Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, and Nicole Restaino sat down with me to discuss Philadelphia’s Centennial and Bicentennial celebrations.

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—Fred Rowland

Nocturnal Rome

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Hans Mueller is the William D. Williams Professor of Classics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Professor Mueller is the author of Roman Religion in Valerius Maximus.

On March 23, 2012, he came to Temple University to discuss his preliminary research on nocturnal Rome. What happened at night in the Roman world? What beliefs did people hold of the night? Before he spoke in the Classics Department, he was kind enough to stop by my office for an interview.

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—Fred Rowland

Talk Radio Host Rob Redding

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Rob Redding is the talk show host of the Redding News Review, a syndicated radio program heard Monday through Friday from 4 to 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the Genesis Communications Network (GCN). On Sundays his program airs between 7 and 10 p.m. on GCN, SiriusXM Satellite Radio Channel 128, and other affiliate radio stations. He also maintains the Redding News Review news web site. He has appeared on Fox News, NPR, and CSpan.

On February 1, he visited Temple University to discuss the presidential elections and his new book Where’s the Change?: Why Neither Obama, nor the GOP Can Solve America’s Problems. Before he spoke in Anderson Hall, he stopped by Paley Library for an interview.

—Fred Rowland

 

Out of Left Field: The Interview

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Professor Rebecca Alpert has had a longstanding interest in baseball since she began following the Brooklyn Dodgers in her youth. As a professor of religion, she has written on topics of modern Judaism and Jewish studies, and on the role of gender and sexuality in religion. When she learned of prominent Jewish booking agents in the Negro Leagues of the 1930s and 1940s, she was able to combine her interests in Jewish studies and baseball. The result is her new book Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball, published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. On February 15, I had the privilege of interviewing Professor Alpert on her new book.

—Fred Rowland