On the Performance Front: Internationalism and US Theatre
During the twentieth century, theatre internationalists around the world believed that live performance could inspire and ensure a better, a more peaceful, world. They took each other’s work seriously and created new work for their own audiences based on what they had learned from each other even when they were not in agreement about what constituted an improved world.
15 Minute History
Episode 83: Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’
Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most important intellectuals, feminists, and writers of the 20th century. Her life and writings defied the expectations of her birth into a middle class French family, and her philosophies inspired others, including Betty Friedan. Her seminal work, The Second Sex, is a dense two volume work that can be intimidating at first glance, combining philosophy and psychology, and her own observations.
Fortunately, Judith Coffin from UT’s Department of History, is here to help contextualize and parse out the context, influences, and impact of one of the 20th century’s greatest feminist works.
Listen to the podcast (or read the transcript) here on our website.
Episode 82: What Writing Can Tell Us About the Arabs before Islam
In most world history survey courses, Arabia is introduced for the first time only as backstory to the rise of Islam. We’re told that there was a tradition of oral poetry in Arabic, a language native to central Arabia, and that the Qur’an was the zenith of this oral tradition. New evidence, however, suggests that Arabia was linguistically diverse, that the language we’ve come to know as Arabic originated in modern day Jordan, and that the looping cursive writing system that’s become the language’s hallmark wasn’t the original system used to write it. What to make of all this?
Guest Ahmad al-Jallad co-directs archaeological/epigraphic projects in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, uncovering new inscriptions thousands of years old, and shares his research that’s shedding new light on the writings of a complex civilization that lived in the Arabian peninsula for centuries before Islam arose.
Listen to the podcast (or read the transcript) here on our website.