In this episode, I join my beloved friends and colleagues Sarah Wells and Emily Boch to talk about why learning about art and culture from the edges of respectable society matters so muchtoday, especially in an era where many American cling to the ideals of normality, conformity, nostalgia, and popularity. Against all odds, the three of us have built vibrant careers studying media, art, and cultural practices created and enacted by people commonly left out of democratic public life:union workers on strike, queer of color performance artists, Jewish American comics creators, queer and feminist filmmakers, psychedelic mixed-media artists, Latin American filmmakers, and much more. We start our conversation bysharing our own stories of how we made our way to participate in artistic or creative worlds traditionally deemed taboo, underground, illegitimate or immature—from superhero comics to queer performance scenes—and then trace how our early attachments became rich areas of study and teaching that we share with students in our day-to-day professional lives. A central concept throughout our conversation is the simple but life-changing practice of permission giving: the idea that sharing, circulating, and discussing marginalized art and culture extends permission to others to explore surprising, unexpected, and unorthodox forms of human expression. For us, themarginal is always in fact, central: central to living freely; central to communing with others in non-violent ways; central to expanding one’s perspective about the diversity of life on earth.

In this episode, I sit down with two of my former Ph.D. students, Adam Schuster and Elaine Cannell, both now full-fledged doctors and professors of English. I ask them what it’s been like to inaugurate their careers during this extraordinarily challenging time for higher education broadly and the humanities in particular. Adam and Elaine spent the better part of a decade learning how to conduct research, teach undergraduates, and write publishable scholarship in literature and cultural studies here at UW Madison. They were also among the kindest, most intellectually generous, joyful, and loving members of our community; as the first two of my students to get their Ph.D. under my mentorship, they hold a very cherished place in my heart. Today, Adam and Elaine are both beloved and respected professors at their universities, Cal State University, Bakersfield for Adam and Saint Mary’s College for Elaine. Despite the bleak conditions of university humanities education, the two have found themselves surrounded by students from every class background, geographical origin, and age, eager to gain the variety of human capacities and professional skills that come with learning how to study literature and popular culture, explore histories of Black and feminist activism, and harness the power of the arts to transform public life for the better. Neither starry eyed and idealistic about the profession, nor cynical and hopeless, Adam and Elaine model a clear-eyed, pragmatic view of today’s intellectual scene. In this episode, they remind listeners that: 1) young people still need community, mentorship, and direction to achieve their goals; 2) despite all the pomp and circumstance about declining literacy rates, Americans still love reading, watching movies, consuming YouTube videos, and playing video games, all of which require some ability to interpret or make meaning of the cultural products we cherish; and perhaps most importantly, 3) sitting in a classroom with thirty to three-hundred and fifty student students at a time during a mass loneliness epidemic is a nourishing and life sustaining practice.

Since the explosive aftermath of nation-wide student activism in support of Palestinian self-determination in the Fall of 2024, the right of scholars to take strong political positions on the most pressing issues of our time has come under extraordinary scrutiny. Despite the supposed protections of tenure, which are intended to protect professors from retaliation for unpopular beliefs or intellectual claims, faculty across the country have been summarily fired or censured not only for explicit political critiques of Israel, but also for supporting initiatives for diversity, equality and inclusion, teaching about histories of marginalized and oppressed people in the U.S. and around the globe, even questioning homophobic and transphobic sentiments made by students in their writing assignments. Echoing the era of McCarthyism, when the mass termination of suspected Communist sympathizers in the academy was coupled with the institution of political purity tests and loyalty oaths, today, professors are pressured into claiming false and intellectually bankrupt forms of political neutrality, backing away from teaching so-called controversial issues and rewriting grant and fellowship applications to remove all references to questions of diversity,histories of violence and oppression, or progressive political values. Pitting the term activist against the idea of the scholar destroys the transformative potential of both: it suggests that activists are problematic upstarts, malcontents and contrarians who contribute nothing but headaches tonational belonging and harmony, while relegating scholars to inert, boring purveyors of supposedly neutral knowledge incapable of having an impact on public affairs. The purpose of this move is to remove professors from public life and to demote their extraordinary influence on generations of American youth.

In this episode, I gather with two of the profession’s most energetic and unflagging scholar-activists, Noura Erakatand Caroline Levine. Far from rejecting or denying the link between scholarly work and activist practice, we argue that the fundamental role of the scholar is to be an unwavering, bold, and courageous intellectual activist fighting forthe values of free thought and expression, collective deliberation, the pursuit of truth (in its many forms), and the sharing of perspectives in the public realm, even those worldviews that many would rather not tolerate or evenconsider. We underscore that taking positions, sharing one’s distinct beliefs, and making a case for why they matter is, in fact, central to the job of a responsible scholar, who’s aim is to teach students how to formulate their own, unique beliefs in dialogue with others.

At the same time, we expand the definition of activism, to include a vast range of practices beyond street level protest, including the facilitation of in-class debate and discussion;the presentation of public talks outside the university; and participation in the crafting of new policy around issues like climate change, international human rights, and universal access to healthcare. In so doing, we reframe the professor as a figure of moral and ethical responsibility, who must play adynamic role in helping generations of youth identify our society’s sources of suffering and come up with varied solutions to collective struggle. We stress that professors with political commitments do not traditionally teach and mentor with the purpose of imposing their beliefs on others, but share them in a spirit of open-ended exchange. This kind of activism is reciprocal, dynamic, playful, imaginative, and meant to inspire the movement of minds, bodies,beliefs, and social worlds against the potential political stagnation and inertia that hounds all projects for democratic freedom.

One of the great gifts of being a professor is the sustained opportunity to be in conversation with young people who never seem to get tired of sharing some aspect of their life with whoever will listen and respond. In my nearly fifteen years of teaching at UW, I’ve taught hundreds of such students, but among these, some stand out. On today’s show I’ve invited four UW Madison alumni, all of whom sat in my classroom at some point in the last fifteen years. Among these astonishing human beings, there are: Ivy league educated doctors, non-profit directors, law school students, award-winning non-fiction writers, youth poet laureates, psychotherapists, and sexual health and consent educators. In our wide-reaching conversation, these four luminary young scholars, doctors, artists, and community service providers share their surprising trajectory from humble origins growing up in various parts of the Midwest, to their life-altering experiences at an internationally renowned land grant university. We discuss how encounters with coursework in Gender & Women’s Studies, Literature, History, and Creative Writing, opened up unexpected doors to new career paths, intellectual pursuits, and an unquenchable thirst for better understanding the world they grew up in (and will now be stewards of). All four stress that the greatest aspect of their education was the gift of recognition: being seen, heard, and acknowledged by professors and university staff as intelligent, capable, insightful human beings who have something invaluable to contribute to the world.

In this episode, I sit with two of my most beloved colleagues and favorite historians, Natasha Zaretsky and Don Romesburg. The three of us have spent a combined sixty years of our lives studying the historical impact of the radical feminist and queer 1970s, a period of astonishing political rebellion that changed the trajectory of American culture forever. We talk about the ways that studying history allows ordinary people to see themselves as part of a rich continuum of human struggle and negotiation across time; can force us to productively reckon with the most painful, beautiful, perplexing, and inspiring aspects of our national past; gives us an incredible tool box of political practices, concepts, and strategies that might have renewed life in the present; and remind us that all our present-day problems came from somewhere, and can only be solved with a clear-eyed understanding of their origins. One of the most persistent themes in our conversation is the idea that history—knowing it, questioning it, contributing to it—can heal individual people and entire communities. Decades ago, the cultural theorist Frederic Jameson famously claimed that“History is what hurts.” He meant that history, the hard realities of events and institutions beyond our control that shaped and constrained our present moment, sets certain, painful limits on our individual ability to change the conditions of existence. In my conversation with Natasha and Don, we flip Jameson’s vision on its head. We suggest that the painful confrontation with history is exactly what allows it to heal us: because a genuine encounter with our past and present reality is one way we can stop telling ourselves lies about why things turned out the way they did. In the light of this kind of truth-telling, anything seems possible.

In this episode, we reference the following books and podcasts (in order of appearance):

Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and Fear of National Decline 1968-1980 (2007)

Natasha Zaretsky, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (2018)

Don Romesburg, Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School (2025)

Jason Stanley, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (2024)

Maintenance Phase Podcast

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994)

Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003)

Julia Mickenburg, Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2005)

Nerd from the Future is back for a second season! We’ve got nine brand-new episodes and an all-star cast of geniuses to help you makes sense of this wild, weird, wondrous universe we’re living in. Since our first encounter last Fall, the world of higher education has gone into a tailspin: the destruction of DEI, the federal slashing of budgets, the elimination of entireprograms in Middle East studies and ethnic, women’s, and disability studies, and the firing of professors for unfashionable political beliefs. Name any outrageous political attack you can imagine, and it’s probably shaking the foundations of your local college campus. But none of this has ever stopped people’s burning desire to learn about their shared history, culture, political values, fantasies, hopes, and aspirations for the future.

In season 1, we made a passionate case for the value of humanities education to enlighten, transform, and heal people from a toxic culture. This season, I’m joined by some of the world’s most dazzling, generous, brilliant, and insightful film scholars, political scientists, medical humanists, anthropologists, literary theorists, and media studies experts; this time, we take for granted the value of the humanities and show you first hand the positive effects higher education has on students, faculty members, and entire communities beyond the walls of the university. In this season’s episodes, we help you get a handle on what’s happening with AI in the college classroom; we outline the responsibility scholars carry to be political activists for democratic freedom; we consider what it means to be a humanities professor in today’s political climate; we identify why it matters to study the art and culture ofsocial outcasts and misfits; we explore how humanities scholars thoughtfully question the authority of science; and we find out what former undergraduates are doing with their heard-earned education. Our guests include professors just starting their professional journeys; recent graduates pursuing careers in thelaw, medicine, creative writing, and the non-profit sector; internationally renowned performance artists; and faculty members of all ages and institutions who’ve changed state policy, drafted human rights appeals in congress, changedthe values of university donors, and founded digital media companies that support the television and film of marginalized artists. Through it all, we work toward a future where the university is truly for everybody.

So, join us on September 14, when we bring the university back to you. See you in the future!

On September 25, 2025, I had the incredible privilege of joining my colleague Ramsey McGlazer at UC Berkeley, my alma mater, for a public conversation about my recent research and writing in the psychedelic humanities. You heard right, there were two Ram-zee’s in the house that day, geeking out like nobody’s business. The room was packed with an amazingly diverse audience of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and many Bay Area community members interested in plant medicines and psychedelic healing practices. You’ll see that I was fully in my element at this event, talking freely and playfully about these ideas with dear friends and former mentors in the room. The Q&A was passionate and energetic. The Nerd from the Future team felt this was a perfect way to top off our first season, with a live episode of your host nerding out in front of a live audience.

After a season of tackling some of the biggest hot button issues relating to higher education today, I felt it was time to share with you how I became the thinker, teacher, and public intellectual you’ve been listening to all these weeks. I couldn’t possibly do that without introducing you all to my nerd from the future—the person who convinced me I could make a living, better yet, a life, as an intellectual. In this very season finale episode, we sit down with my great mentor Dr. Kathleen Moran, Emerita professor of American Studies at UC Berkeley, and another one of her former students, Justin Gomer, a professor of American Studies at Cal State Long Beach. Higher education brought Justin and I into Kathy’s luminous orbit. In my case, as an eager, nerdy undergraduate searching for my calling, in Justin’s, as an early career PhD student building the confidence to pursue his intellectual passions. But our incredible life-long bond with this brilliant, energetic, bold, and loving scholar was the unexpected outcome of years studying and growing alongside Kathy. Though the three of us come from different generations, in a way we’ve all grown up together: first as students and mentor, then as friends, then as colleagues, and now as chosen family. Since I graduated from Berkeley twenty-two years ago, Kathy has been like a second mother to me, one of my most enduring champions and cheerleaders, an avid reader of my scholarship, and of course, a model of the kind of teacher I always aspire to be to my students. In our wide-ranging conversation, the three of us share how we each traveled a different road to becoming our own version of a Nerd from the Future, while somehow managing to cross paths along the way, forever transforming one another at crucial moments in our lives. Over and over, we return to a central idea that has animated this podcast since our first episode: namely, that the magic of getting educated lies in the spontaneous, unpredictable collision of people willing and ready to be changed by the ideas and perspectives of others. Kathy, Justin, and I were the beneficiaries of this unexpected collision, one that can technically happen in any walk of life, but that the university specializes in. I could spend hours gushing about Kathy and the astonishing impact she’s had on my life, but I think I’ll let you see for yourself.