Episode 12: Liza Yeager, Amelia Golcheski, and Jim McGrath on Podcasts (Season Finale!)

Liza Yeager
Liza Yeager

What’s it like to work on a podcasts? Why are podcasts so popular in the twenty-first century? We talk about this stuff and more in the season finale of Public Work! This week’s episode begins with a conversation between Amelia and Jim on the secret origins of Public Work, the ubiquity of podcasts, and what they’ve learned from working on this project. Then Jim talks to Liza Yeager, an audio producer and storyteller (and a Brown University alum!) who has worked on a range of podcasts, radio programs, and other cool projects. Liza talks about what led her to co-found Now Here This (a student-led audio storytelling project) at Brown, tells us what she’s learned about radio and podcasts from her work with NPR’s Story Lab, Jacobin’s The Dig podcast, and other projects, and describes what she cares about when producing, telling, and hearing audio-centric forms of storytelling.

Public Work is produced and hosted by Amelia Golcheski and Jim McGrath This is the last episode of Public Work with this team, as Amelia has recently graduated. Congrats Amelia! Stay tuned to @PublicWorkPod and @publichumans on Twitter to learn what podcast projects are on the horizon at Brown’s Center for Public Humanities!

Liza Yeager is an audio producer mostly based in Providence, RI. She has worked on a range of podcast, radio, and audio storytelling projects, including NPR’s Story Lab (where she was their first intern), Jacobin Magazine’s The Dig podcast, and State of Wonder, an arts and culture show with Oregon Public Broadcasting. As an undergraduate at Brown, she was a co-founder of Now Here This, a platform for student-produced audio stories. You can learn more about Liza at her web site.

You can find every episode of Public Work on iTunes, and you can listen via the Anchor embed below (or find and download episodes on our Anchor page). We’ve also backed up every episode of Public Work in Brown University’s Digital Repository for long-term preservation.

Episode 12: Liza Yeager, Amelia Golcheski, and Jim McGrath on Podcasts by Public Work: a public humanities podcast

Welcome to the season finale of Public Work! This week’s episode begins with a conversation between Amelia and Jim on the secret origins of Public Work, the ubiquity of podcasts, and what they’ve learned from working on this project. Then Jim talks to Liza Yeager, an audio producer and storyteller (and a Brown University alum!)

The music on this episode is excerpted from the song “New Day” by Lee Rosevere (licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International).

Episode 03: Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet on Monuments and Memory

Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet

This episode kicks off a series focusing on Gallery Lab, an exciting initiative here at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage that invites graduate students and their collaborators to curate, perform, and organize an exciting array of exhibitions, events, and activities. You can read more about Gallery Lab in the Brown Daily Herald and check out the full calendar of events here.

Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet stopped by Public Work to talk about “Monument Worthy,” an exhibition they curated on the topic of “personal memory markers.” Hear Hannah and Molly talk with Jim and Amelia about the monuments and debates informing their work, the forms of monuments to personal memory that were revealed in their exhibition, and the ways we remember, erase, and interrogate history through our relationships to material objects large and small.

Hannah Mooney is a first year in the Public Humanities Master’s Program, who is interested in public history, museum education, and historic preservation. Aside from Public Work, her favorite podcast is 2 Dope Queens. For tweets related to museums and history, or more likely dogs, you can follow her @hannahemooney.

Molly Pailet is a first-year student in the MA Public Humanities Program. She is passionate about applied history, non-traditional education, and creating opportunities for engagement and connection. Her favorite podcast is The Mortified Guide, because she too has a very embarrassing collection of journals that the historian in her can’t bear to get rid of…primary source documents! Check her out on Twitter @akimboflamingo.

You can find every episode of Public Work on iTunes, and you can listen via the Anchor embed below (or find and download episodes on our Anchor page). We’ve also backed up every episode of Public Work in Brown University’s Digital Repository for long-term preservation.

Episode 03: Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet on Monuments and Memory by Public Work: a public humanities podcast

Hannah Mooney and Molly Pailet stopped by Public Work to talk about “Monument Worthy,” an exhibition they curated on the topic of “personal memory markers.” Hear Hannah and Molly talk with Jim and Amelia about the monuments and debates informing their work, the forms of monuments to personal memory that were revealed in their exhibition, and the ways we remember, erase, and interrogate history through our relationships to material objects large and small.

Show Notes

Learn more about Itaru Sasaki’s phone booth (mentioned by Molly) at This American Life and CityLab.

New Orleans Mayor Rich Landrieu’s speech on the removal of Confederate monuments (mentioned by Hannah) can be found online: here is a transcript and here is video.

When asked for reading recommendations on monuments and memory, Molly and Hannah mention Erika Doss’ Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010) and Dell Upton’s What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (2015).

The music on this episode is excerpted from the song “New Day” by Lee Rosevere (licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)

Episode 01: Ideas of Interpretation at The Smart Museum of Art

In our first episode, Bryn Pernot, a second year Master’s in Public Humanities student at Brown University, speaks to Michael Christiano, Deputy Director for Audience Engagement and Public Practice at The Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. Their conversation touches on some of the most pressing topics in the museum field: the changing definition of “interpretation”, questions of institutional relevancy faced by museums in the 21st century, and the roles museums can, and should play, in their own neighborhoods and communities.

Bryn Pernot brings together anthropology, art, design, and games to research and develop innovative programs that integrate diverse backgrounds and perspectives and provide a space for public participation. Bryn is on Twitter @bryn_pernot.

Michael Christiano is Deputy Director and Curator of Public Practice at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. In this role, he develops strategies and programs that reflect on the nature of the Museum’s institutional practice, with a particular focus on education, interpretation, visitor experience, communications, installation strategy, and other key issues.

You can find every episode of Public Work on iTunes, and you can listen via the Anchor embed below (or find and download episodes on our Anchor page). We’ve also backed up every episode of Public Work in Brown University’s Digital Repository for long-term preservation.

https://anchor.fm/public-work-a-public-humanities-podcast/episodes/Episode-01-Ideas-of-Interpretation-at-The-Smart-Museum-of-Art-e3gonn/a-ac0vli

Show Notes

Emmanuel Pratt,, The Smart Museum’s 2017-18 Interpreter in Residence, is talked about a lot in this episode. You can learn more about Emmanuel and his great work (including some of the public programming mentioned towards the end of the episode) here.

Watch Emmanuel discuss the exciting “We The Publics” project (currently part of The Smart’s “Radical [Re]Constructions” installation here.

For more on The Smart Museum, follow them on Twitter @SmartUChicago.

The music on this episode is excerpted from the song “New Day” by Lee Rosevere (licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)

Comments on this episode? Find Public Work on Twitter @PublicWorkPod, or email us: publicworkpodcast[at]gmail.